Holiday delivery preferences shift globally

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Holiday delivery preferences shift globally

  • Holiday delivery preferences shift globally
1 minute de lecture

2025 is a fairly unusual year in terms of the context that surrounds consumers as they make their holiday shopping decisions. Results from the latest Blue Yonder Global Shipping survey show that shoppers around the world are adjusting their online shopping and delivery preferences according to tariff exposure, inflation and sustainability awareness. So what does that mean for posts and parcel carriers in 2025’s peak season and beyond?

Today we’ll look at three angles:

  • The changing context and how consumers are reacting
  • Consumer demand for alternative deliveries—if it’s worth their while
  • Speed, and consumer confidence in delivery promises

 

Sustainability drives new willingness

Bundling is great for parcel carriers, allowing them to increase drop density and make routes more efficient. It’s already part of the delivery proposition from some retailers, particularly those which are vertically integrated, owning both the retail experience and the logistics of delivery. (This is also sometimes offered by delivery apps which can coordinate additional stops—e.g., getting groceries added to your pizza delivery.)

So consumers clearly already have some appetite for bundling orders together and adding in the sustainability pitch convinces a majority of shoppers. 

Carriers and postal operators could look to offer this as a delivery option for retail clients or consumers, consolidating packages into a single delivery day. This could occur with multiple packages from one retailer, if pitched to the retailer as a delivery option, or from single packages spread across multiple retailers, if pitched to the consumer. 

Either way, this kind of proposition works best with a real-time view of orders combined with an accurate and personalized estimate of potential emissions savings.

Aside from bundling, consumers also expressed willingness to pay an offsetting price or receive deliveries later, for sustainability reasons. 

Let’s look at delivery speed first. Slower delivery speeds could be useful to help posts and parcel carriers to smooth out volume spikes and match demand to capacity more efficiently—connecting their own actual emissions data to delivery propositions, combined with real-time network and capacity visibility, they could offer a personalized delivery speed and emissions saving to consumers.

Offsetting contributions are perhaps a nice-to-have feature for consumers and might be relatively easy to implement, but they don’t necessarily drive any other efficiencies for parcel logistics.

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Tariffs and inflation

In the U.S., a majority (60%) of consumers said they expect to shift their purchasing habits in response to additional duties and tariffs. 44% said they’d reduce international purchases, and 10% would shift more purchases to local retailers.

Internationally, 46% of consumers said that inflation would drive them to reduce their online shopping purchases, with 9% shifting more purchases to local retailers.

Posts and parcel carriers might be anticipating a slowdown in 2025 holiday cross-border e-commerce, thanks to tariffs, but it looks like there may be a broader shift away from online shopping as well, which could impact volumes and capacity planning

Broad willingness for alternative delivery methods—if it’s cheaper or faster

Generally speaking, lots of consumers say they’re willing to use alternative delivery methods if it makes their deliveries faster or free, with the popularity of lockers being particularly noteworthy from the perspective of parcel carriers and postal operators. 

If it made deliveries faster, 53% of consumers said they’d be willing to utilize in-store pickup, and 42% would use a locker to pick up a delivery. For free deliveries, 49% would pick up in-store and 38% would use a locker.

Locker pickup for faster deliveries was most popular in France (58%), Germany (53%) and the U.K. (49%), and the same three countries topped the ranks of locker preference for free deliveries.

Overall, for a faster delivery, just 12% said they wouldn’t consider any alternative to home delivery, and for a free delivery, that number falls to just 10%, showing that massive majorities of consumers are willing to change their holiday shopping delivery behavior if there’s an immediate benefit in cost or speed.

Out-of-home deliveries massively increase drop density and delivery reliability, transforming route efficiency. Incentivizing consumer adoption with price is perhaps easier for parcel carriers to achieve and to justify thanks to those improved unit economics, but this survey shows that speed is also a compelling incentive for changing consumer delivery behavior.

Speed expectations are high, but confidence is not

More than half of global shoppers (53%) expect delivery within 2-4 days of ordering. At the same time, only one-third (34%) are very confident that packages will arrive by the expected date.

This reflects the limitations of wide, one-size-fits-all delivery estimates, which tend to be presented to consumers regardless of available capacity, known delays, transportation partner availability and performance, and volume currently in the network. 

Having a real-time, accurate view of your network allows you to start building in those real on-the-ground factors into your delivery estimates, meaning you can be both more precise and more accurate, giving customers delivery windows that aren’t 3-5 days wide, and giving them confidence in your ability to meet those delivery promises.

Find out how Blue Yonder can help postal and parcel carriers to navigate changing consumer expectations and win more business in e-commerce delivery.