Delivering Packages During a Pandemic: How Technology Helps
by Ian Novack
In the context of government-mandated lockdowns and quarantines, shopping online has become crucial for our everyday lives. Ecommerce is helping consumers of all ages to maintain a sense of normalcy while they remain indoors or manage travel restrictions. As people are forced away from brick and mortar stores, it is increasingly important to ensure your business is able to timely ship merchandise to customers.
The Department of Homeland Security has declared transportation systems and manufacturing to be critical infrastructure during the COVID-19 outbreak. Unfortunately, not all carriers have been able to handle the drastic changes as they address new COVID-19 realities ranging from sudden border closures to sanitization and safety requirements. A number of carriers have been forced to reduce services or close their offices temporarily, while trusted names like USPS, UPS, and FedEx have been — until recently — operating at near full-capacity domestically.
As demand continues to increase and overwhelm the system, carrier SLAs will likely continue to be pushed to the brink and bottlenecks consequently will emerge. As the large carriers start to feel the effects of COVID-19, regional carriers will play an increased role in alleviating pressure from the forced demand by offering delivery services in local areas. Carriers’ technology rails are also being impacted where they are managing heightened strain on their internal systems due to their absorbing an inundation of requests and support tickets and focus on the actual movement of packages. If you generate labels directly through a carrier or a mid-market multi-carrier tool, you may suffer outages in the coming months as their infrastructure has never been met with such demand.
As a retailer, whether online or offline, you need to be thinking about how your orders are going to be delivered to best serve your customers over the upcoming months (and potentially longer) amid these delays. EasyPost offers a best-in-class solution that will support this sudden increase in shipping demand. As a PC Postage provider, we are required to maintain an infrastructure that can handle millions of API calls daily while maintaining an uptime and response SLA that is unparalleled in the industry.
EasyPost’s proprietary technology is the solution to help you ship through a crisis
A flexible shipping solution is paramount to the retention and growth of your customer base, keeping up with customer expectations, and navigating the operational disruptions carriers are suffering. EasyPost’s Shipping API helps companies proactively navigate delivery disruptions. Here are some of the benefits that our technology offers:
- Quickly shift your shipping volume from one carrier to another. If one of the carriers you rely on for a specific area or service level is affected or disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, voiding all SLA guarantees, you will have redundancy with other carriers who may still maintain your SLAs. Having a single integration with EasyPost provides you access to 100+ carriers, meaning you can seamlessly switch from one carrier to another without having to build another integration. Our API offerings allow you to make real-time shipping decisions as the world rapidly changes due to the evolving pandemic.
- Focus on your core business by offloading shipping developer time. We built EasyPost to automate our customer’s shipping process and scale their shipping volume over time. Leave the shipping infrastructure development to us so that your developers can focus on critical projects for your business.
- Future proof your business. This pandemic will have permanent effects on the ecommerce landscape. A wider range of individuals have been pushed to adopt ecommerce and will likely continue to rely on online retailers moving forward. Integrating a stable shipping solution will help your ecommerce business scale post COVID-19.
EasyPost is working 24/7 to monitor the COVID-19 situation worldwide. We have developers updating and maintaining our Shipping API constantly so that our customers can focus on what matters most in these harsh times: serving their customers. If you’re considering a flexible and reliable shipping solution for your business, you can get started with EasyPost for free today.
Logistics experts are here to help
Entrepreneurs need flexibility, and EasyPost allows its users to react quickly when carrier operations are disrupted by demand peaks or global pandemics. We connect companies to 100+ carriers worldwide — generating shipping labels, verifying addresses and enabling live tracking for our users and their customers. We keep our technology up to date, allowing our users to focus on their businesses operations, rather than the shipping industry.
During this critical time, carriers are delivering more than just packages; they’re delivering nourishment, comfort, and in some cases, life-saving resources. It is paramount you keep shipping your products to customers and play your part in helping every single customer get through this pandemic. Please reach out to our team of logistics experts at covid-response@easypost.com with any questions, thoughts, or concerns. We are happy to guide you through these unprecedented times.