Holiday Cutoffs & Best Practices (2023-2024)

The holidays are around the corner, and Spaceful is committed to bringing you and your shoppers joy with streamlined fulfillment this holiday season.

While the labor shortage is real and we have to adapt by increasing incentives and wages for our staff, there are no seasonal cost increases for our services including warehousing fees, but carriers have implemented peak surcharges for domestic shipments that will result in a passthrough.

There are a few things we ask you to keep in mind to have the best holiday fulfillment experience for you and your customers. Below, we cover:

• Spaceful holiday cutoffs and turnaround times

• Inventory receiving cutoff 

• Spaceful SLA extensions

• And more important points

Spaceful holiday cutoffs and turnaround times

Below is our holiday cutoff schedule for shipments as well as our operations. Our team has been making many strides over the past few months to prepare for peak season, including hiring more on our fulfillment, tech support, and merchant support teams.

Our holiday schedule can be viewed here: LINK

Domestic shipments

While there is no guarantee for delivery by or on a particular day, the below guidance has been provided by our carriers for domestic delivery by Christmas.

Purolator

Canada Post

GLS

Loomis

UPS

FedEx

Canpar

Intelcom

(Links will be updated as the information is made available)

Inventory receiving cutoff

November 24 is the last day your inventory can arrive at our fulfillment centers to ensure delivery to customers by Christmas via Standard Ground processing. Based on our standard turnaround times, it can take up to 5 business days for your inventory to be completely received and stored once it arrives.

Receiving orders that arrive after this day and are required for holiday orders may be subject to additional processing fees. Spaceful will not be held liable for orders that do not arrive on time if the receiving order arrived at our fulfillment center after the inventory receiving cutoff date.

Without a Warehouse Receiving Order (WRO) filled out accurately and the receiving slip included, we are unable to process your inventory and it will be moved to a status of on hold and incur daily fees.

Sharing your holiday forecast with Spaceful

Spaceful uses forecasting data to scale up our workforce so we can ensure your orders are fulfilled on time. To do so, we rely on you telling us when we can expect to fulfill an order volume that is greater than your typical volume.

If you project a large increase in orders, please advise our Merchant Support team (merchantsupport@spaceful.ca) or your Account Manager, especially if you plan on starting promotions earlier than Black Friday this year.

Spaceful SLA extensions

Our facilities will hire additional associates to meet the increased demand of the peak season, however, we expect to receive more orders than can physically be processed within our standard SLAs. As such, we will add extensions to our SLAs (in business days), which will go into effect starting on November 24 and remain in effect until January 7th.

The SLA extension applies to standard fulfillment for outbound B2C shipments, B2B orders, and kitting. The outbound fulfillment extension does not apply to expedited orders.

Returns: During the Peak Period SLA extension, returns will be processed, to the best of our ability with no guarantee, within 10 business days.

Tracking packages

As a reminder, our carriers do NOT guarantee package scans at our facilities upon pickup due to order volume. However, Spaceful has internal processes to monitor package status to ensure carrier pickup.

During the holidays, our carriers experience an increase in volume that can cause a delay in tracking scans and updates. We highly encourage our clients to monitor tracking speeds and delays, in the event that delays are publicly communicated we will update this article. As a reminder, tracking information may only be updated by a carrier up to 72 hours after it has been marked as shipped.