UPS Delivery Crisis Hits Customers Across the US

It was bound to happen eventually - and probably will do so again.

Delivery firms working on tight margins and one or two-day guarantees need some pretty accurate forecasting to plan for a six-week spike that you simply wouldn't believe.

In fact, forecasters at UPS didn't believe it. They planned for 132 million deliveries in the week before Christmas Day and, the company admitted, 'obviously we exceeded that'.

The company had hired 55,000 season workers - roughly the same as the past two years. But the surge in demand this year meant the US Postal System, which had initially predicted packages would rise 12 per cent, began operating on Sunday to accommodate the 19 per cent rise.

At the same time Amazon said that 1 million new customers joined its $79-a-year Amazon Prime service in the week before Christmas to enjoy its late delivery-guaranteed ‘free two-day shipping’ service.

Amazon said it dispatched all its orders on time and added that it was 'reviewing the performance of its delivery carriers.'

Amazon has taken immediate action - a lesson to all online retailers - by handing back any delivery charges associated with the offending packages and giving customers $20 gift vouchers.

Certainly bad weather didn't help UPS and other carriers complained of high volumes.

But there has been speculation that mobile ordering is to blame - that it is harder to build up a shopping cart using a mobile phone and that customers of retailers like Amazon might prefer to simply place multiple orders - the cost is often the same on Amazon.

Amazon said this week that more than half its customers shopped on a mobile phone or tablet ordering an average of 426 items a second on Cyber Monday - 36.8 million items in total on the day.

Custora Pulse said, overall across the country, one in three items were ordered from tablets or phones this year compared to one in four items last year.

But, more worryingly, researchers at StellaService tested 25 retailers and their cut-off dates. It ordered three packages from each firm, one to each of three regions. It said a third of the retailers failed to deliver packages on time including ones from Macys.com, Gap.com, Kohls.com, Nordstrom.com and BarnesAndNoble.com.