The Delivery Conference 2025 review: Peak season insights unveiled during Central London event

A logistical overview of the global peak Christmas season just passed was provided to those attending The Delivery Conference (TDC) 2025 in London this week by Emma Clarke, Senior Director of Product Management at Metapack.

Drilling down into her firm’s data she showed how £464 million was lost in the EU due to missing parcels, while outlining how retailers can improve performance and customer experiences (CX) by following five key recommendations, such as implementing a multi-carrier strategy.  

In a presentation at the Royal Lancaster Hotel, Clarke showed how her company’s analysis of the anonymised delivery data flowing over its systems, and other publicly available information, showed that only 82.8% of parcels were delivered on time during the peak season 2024. Spikes up to as high as 21% in lateness at certain busy times over the crucial Christmas shopping period were also evident.

“Checkout requests spiked over the cyber weekend, with Black Friday obviously the busiest day,” explained Clarke, while explaining that there was then a down the line impact on warehouse fulfilment and delivery success rates. “The lowest performing carrier had a 57% failure rate,” she said.

Having a multi-carrier strategy to isolate such a provider would obviously be beneficial. But only 1 in 14 currently do so, according to Clarke, “with even fewer using [internal] real-time tracking and oversight in this area”.      

In her next slide desk, during her presentation in London, Clarke showed how 8.34% of parcels were in an “exception state” over the crucial Christmas 2024 shopping period just gone. This negatively impacts CX, potential retention rates, costs, and so on. Key causes of the exception state problems were:

·       27.86% of issues were simply down to delays in the delivery procedure 

·       27.31% of exception issues were due to failed delivery attempts

·       15.01% of issues were due to delivery address problems.  

The latter can be simply solved by e-commerce and indeed all forms of retailer getting the required address quality procedures right during their checkout procedure. Clarke said it was “surprising” some hadn’t done so already. Data capture, good tracking, oversight, flexibility in how you route parcels, and so on are all vital in delivering a good service.     

Away from the UK and European data that understandably constituted the majority of her presentation at TDC 2025, Clarke also talked about the global supply chain. She pointed out that 10.9% of doorstep delivery failures was down to earlier blockages at customs - Taiwan, Nigeria, Switzerland and Iceland were the major hot spot obstacles in this regard.   

More locally, she identified Croydon on the edge of south London, as the “hottest of hot spots” in the UK capital for delivery failures. “I’d order any Christmas present early, if I lived there,” she joked. 

Key recommendations

The best way to respond to the delivery challenges outlined in her presentation, was addressed next by Clarke’s. The aforementioned multi-carrier strategy is one possible option - when and if a retailer can identify any problems early enough in the procedure. All five of the key recommendations are listed below:

1.     Incentivise PUDO to improve peak delivery performance: The use of Pick Up/Drop Off boxes or designated locations to deliver, collect, and return parcels reduces operating costs. It also cuts down on any address issues and where is my order (WISMO) calls upon the time of customer service agents or systems. It can be a differentiator.

As Clarke said: “PUDO has a 99.1% delivery success rate.” You can also encourage uptake by sharing the savings with customers – for instance, 65% will take up PUDO if retailers offer it for free, which might be worth their while to do considering that lost parcels can cost them hundreds of pounds. “You’ll get happier, repeat customers that advocate for your brand as well.”  

2.     Build out dynamic delivery options to maximise your marketing spend: 58% of consumers pick a retailer that offers a hard and fast delivery date early in the ordering process. “I’d recommend prioritising this before the 2025 peak season,” said Clarke.

3.     Detect early failure in  your warehouse and have the capability to upgrade delivery: This can avoid pushing delivery execution from two to an unacceptable three days, advised Clarke, but only if retailers are across the data and flexible enough to respond.

4.     Implement a mature multicarrier strategy. This could reduce delivery failure by half, advised Clarke.

5.     Identify and act on fraud hot spots: Building out intelligent consumer-facing anti-fraud measures and deploying good internal anti-theft solutions, in warehouses and so forth, can lower financial exposures for retailers. Checking the weight of parcels versus described goods, the validity of shipping labels, and so on can all cut leakages.

2025 RTIH INNOVATION AWARDS

Online delivery will be a key focus area at the 2025 RTIH Innovation Awards.

The awards. which will open for entries in March, celebrate global tech innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world.

Our 2024 hall of fame entrants were revealed during an event which took place at RIBA’s 66 Portland Place HQ in Central London on 21st November, and consisted of a drinks reception, three course meal, and awards ceremony presided over by comedian Lucy Porter.

In his welcome speech, Scott Thompson, Founder and Editor, RTIH, said: “The event is now into its sixth year and what a journey it has been. The awards started life as an online only affair during the Covid outbreak, before launching as a small scale in real life event and growing year on year to the point where we’re now selling out this fine, historic venue.”

He added: “Congratulations to all of our finalists. Many submissions did not make it through to the final stage, and getting to this point is no mean feat. Checkout-free stores, automated supply chains, immersive experiences, on-demand delivery, next generation loyalty offerings, inclusive retail, green technology. We’ve got all the cool stuff covered this evening.”

“But just importantly we’ve got lots of great examples of companies taking innovative tech and making it usable in everyday operations - resulting in more efficiency and profitability in all areas.”

Congratulations to our 2024 winners, and a big thank you to our sponsors, judging panel, the legend that is Lucy Porter, and all those who attended November's gathering. 

For further information on the 2025 RTIH Innovation Awards, please fill in the below form and we will get back to you asap.