Orders that come in when you're off: evenings, weekends and holidays
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by Verpakkingdeals.nl
6 min reading time
Half of your orders come in when you're not working. Here's how to organize your evenings, weekends, and days off so you don't start Monday with a mountain of tasks.
Look at the times of your last fifty orders. Chances are that the peak is in the evening between eight and eleven, and that Sunday is one of your better days. That makes sense: people order when they are free. The annoying thing is that you are usually free then too, and that orders from Friday evening to Sunday evening pile up into a Monday morning where you start with a backlog you didn't cause yourself.
You don't solve that by working on the weekend. You solve it by arranging three things beforehand: what you promise, what you have in stock, and in what order you start on Monday.
First, see when your orders truly come in
Before you change anything: export your orders from the past three months and count by time of day. You are looking for three numbers.
What percentage comes in outside your working hours?
How many of those orders are letterbox packages and how many are parcels?
How many orders come in on your busiest Saturday, not on average but on the outlier?
That last number determines your stock. Planning based on the average is precisely why you run out of boxes in November when you thought you had enough in June.
Promise nothing you can't deliver on Saturday
Most irritation arises not because a package is delayed by a day, but because something different was stated on the site. Therefore, on your shipping page and in your confirmation email, state literally what happens to an order placed on Friday evening.
A formulation that works and that you can always deliver on:
Ordered on weekdays before your own packing time: shipped the same day.
Ordered in the evening, on the weekend, or on a closing day: shipped the next business day.
Closing days are listed with dates on the shipping page, not just in a banner that people dismiss.
Choose one fixed delivery time per day and plan your day around it. What the last drop-off time at your collection point or for your pickup round is, varies by carrier and location — ask your own carrier and write it down on a note above your packing table, so you don't have to think about it every day.
A forty-minute Saturday round
If you happen to be near your workplace, a short round on the weekend is worth its weight in gold — not for shipping, but to shorten Monday. Forty minutes is enough for:
Printing orders or putting them on your screen and sorting them by size: letterbox, small parcel, large parcel.
Gathering items in advance and arranging them per order.
Preparing the boxes and envelopes you will need on Monday, folded and stacked.
Setting aside orders with a question or an unusual address. These are the orders that would otherwise disrupt your entire rhythm on Monday.
What you don't do in that round: seal and label. You do that on Monday in one series, because working in series is almost always faster than completing everything per order.
Stock that needs to survive a weekend
The rule is simple: you have enough packaging in stock to handle your busiest weekend plus two business days. If you're below that, reordering is not an option but a task for this week.
If you are sending something valuable or sensitive, VOID security seals (60 pieces, €9.95) are a cheap way to show that a package has not been opened in transit.
Holidays and closing days: put them in your calendar now
Closing days are predictable, yet they come as a surprise every year. Put the days when you or your carrier are not working in your calendar now, with a reminder a week before. In that week, you do three things: put the date on your shipping page, check your stock for the peak that usually precedes it, and determine until when you will still accept an order with the promise that it will be shipped before the closing.
If you're closing for a few days, a short notice at the top of your shipping information is enough. Customers almost always accept a longer delivery time, as long as they know about it before checkout and not after.
Monday morning: the order that clears fastest
Don't start with the oldest order, but with the largest stack of identical shipments. All letterbox shipments consecutively, then the small parcels, then the rest. Only after that, the orders with a question, a long delivery time, or a missing item — these require attention, and you don't have that attention if there are still thirty simple packages to go.
What you prepare the evening before counts double: boxes folded, tape in the dispenser, labels by the printer, filling material within reach. A Monday that starts at eight o'clock with an empty table always takes longer than a Monday that starts with a table that is already set up.
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