How retailers can prepare for the holiday season in light of a stabilized supply chain

The global supply chain crisis that started in 2020 and bled into this year has largely resolved, but the holiday shopping season is when those improvements are really put to the test.

Although many retailers have bumped up their holiday shopping sales well ahead of Black Friday, roughly 40% of all holiday retail dollars will be spent in the next five weeks. Black Friday (November 24), Super Saturday (December 23), and December 16 will be the busiest days of the holiday shopping season, according to Sensormatic Solutions.

• Retailers are finally rebounding from the inventory backlogs that led to many sales earlier in the year, but for the holidays, they’ll need to shore up their channels to make the most of what will be their busiest time of the year.

“Most retailers have, in my opinion, generally found a reasonable state of total level of inventory in their supply chain and in their stores—some better than others, certainly,” Andrew Billings, VP and supply chain lead at North Highland, told Retail Brew. “It is now about the allocation of that inventory across channels, and the ability to truly have an omni-inventory capability where I can move inventory fairly seamlessly, quickly, and at low cost between channels.”

Cross it up: Billings said supply chain leaders should focus on three areas this holiday season.

• Cross-channel flexibility: being able to share products across channels to prevent inventory instability
• Cross-channel fulfillment agility: using ship-from-store tools to optimize service and cost impacts
• Economic environment awareness: Operating costs should be closely monitored to create opportunities for higher margins.

“You’re going to see, this holiday season, a lot of those networks being tested because of the need to dynamically move inventory across channels, across regions,” he said. “And so those investments that have been made over the last decade to really integrate the supply chains across channels are going to show up in inventory availability in stores and online for some of the largest retailers.”

Two-thirds of logistics firms (67%) say that inventory they’re bringing into stores this holiday shopping season is lower-cost and promotional, according to an October CNBC Supply Chain Survey.

And even more (83%) said they’re not moving more expensive items, given reduced consumer spending.

• For the first nine months of the year, cargo containers coming through Southern California ports were down 19% YoY, according to WWD.
• That’s in line with the nationwide 18% decrease in imports from Asia.

“Retailers are finding that the items they rely on to bring people into the store and boost sales are costing them more,” Noah Hoffman, C.H. Robinson’s VP of North American Surface Transportation, told CNBC. “That’s limiting how much they can discount so we’re working with them to find savings elsewhere in their supply chains.”