Peak season used to come down to one frantic weekend. Now it stretches across most of Q4, and the brands that win it are the ones whose fulfillment partner planned for it months ahead.
We sat down with two of the people who lead that planning at ShipMonk: Franklin Castro, Sr. Director of Client Experience, and Melissa Marotta, Head of Merchant Success. Franklin’s CX team handles day-to-day merchant support, claims and special projects, working as boots on the ground in our fulfillment centers. Melissa spent four and a half years on ShipMonk’s sales team before moving to lead merchant success, where her team owns strategy, renewals and overall account health for our merchants.
Their two teams work together “all day, every day,” and peak season is where that partnership matters most. This post is part of our series on how each ShipMonk team gets ready for peak. In this edition, Franklin and Melissa share how peak has changed, what merchants are up against, and how their teams prepare so merchants can say yes to every opportunity.
From the Super Bowl to the World Cup
The biggest shift Franklin has seen in his four years at ShipMonk is the calendar itself. “Peak season used to really just be that Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend,” he said. “Now it’s basically the entire month of November, and arguably October as well.”
Melissa put it in sports terms:
“It used to feel more like a Super Bowl. That weekend, you’re prepping everything for that one day. It’s game day. Now it’s more similar to the World Cup. You start having some sales, you have your group stages, and all of a sudden it starts to intensify. You have your playoff stages and your knockout rounds, and then it comes to the finals.”
A longer peak isn’t all bad news. Spreading volume across weeks instead of four days makes labor easier to plan. But it changes what merchants need from their 3PL. “It used to be a sprint,” Franklin said. “Now it’s an endurance race. Merchants expect us to show up at a very high level every single day, and instead of it being over a couple of days, now it’s over a full month or even longer.”
Merchants are adapting too. Melissa sees brands getting more creative with promotions and marketing ahead of peak, and clearing slow-moving inventory early to make room for the stock that’s coming in. That means more inventory moves, disposals and donations behind the scenes, all before the first holiday order ships.
Every order is a first impression
During COVID, Melissa said, ecommerce brands were focused on one thing: growth. Get into as many warehouses as possible, reach as many customers as possible. As retail came back, the focus moved to retention, with brands paying much closer attention to pack-out quality and the end-customer experience.
Peak flips that back for a few weeks. Promotions, social campaigns and shifting algorithms put brands in front of shoppers they don’t normally reach. “Peak is their opportunity to gain new customers, to have that first experience all over again,” Melissa said. “So the expectations are always extremely high.”
That raises the stakes on every single shipment. Franklin described it this way:
“Every order is the opportunity to win a client over for a longer time. Orders almost represent a promise from the brand to the customer: that it’s going to ship on time, every time, arrive without damage, and match what they expect to receive. We have to treat each of those orders as if it’s our own, with urgency and ownership.”
Merchant first means being on the floor
At ShipMonk, “merchant first” isn’t a peak-season slogan. Melissa says it’s always top of mind. What changes during peak is where the team spends its time: in the warehouse.
“This is our merchants’ most critical time of the year,” she said. “This is their company, this is their baby, and they’re outsourcing it to us. We don’t want them to lose control. We want them to have the trust in us to deliver.”
So ShipMonk sends its leaders onto the floor for peak. If something comes up, someone is already there to solve it and to tell the merchant exactly what’s happening. Franklin’s CX team works the same way year-round, reporting on “things that you can only see from the ground.”
The time on the floor pays off long after peak ends. “How could you support ShipMonk, or train a merchant on the platform, if you don’t know how to do it yourself?” Melissa said. “Every year I’m in the warehouse, I learn so much. When I go back to have conversations with merchants, I’m that much more educated, and I can connect the dots to help advise them.”
It also sets the tone for the whole team. “Everybody’s in a warehouse, working hard, making sure we’re getting things out,” she said. “It becomes a celebration, that game-day mentality. At the end of it we take a big sigh of relief, and then we start prepping again two months later.”
How we’re preparing for peak this year
Both leaders describe themselves as “comfortable and confident” heading into this season, and both point to the same reason: the work started early.
- Planning started six weeks earlier. ShipMonk began peak planning about a month and a half ahead of its usual timeline, based on lessons from past seasons.
- Face-to-face merchant visits. With many new merchants onboarded this year, Franklin and Melissa have visited 15 to 20 merchants before peak, including an East Coast tour and an upcoming West Coast tour. “Peak is just so loud and noisy,” Melissa said. “If you’re face to face with somebody, things will come out that wouldn’t on a phone call.”
- A stronger CX leadership team. Franklin’s team has spent recent months on staffing, development and training, building a mix of operational experience, professional CX backgrounds and process excellence.
- The 1% details. The basics of equipment, labor, days and staffing are covered. Now the focus is on small improvements that add up, like a dedicated escalation contact who is fully available during specific hours, and daily morale boosts like themed t-shirt competitions on the floor.
Confidence doesn’t mean coasting. “Peak has a way of testing all the assumptions, the math and the forecasts,” Franklin said. “We feel confident going into this, but not complacent. We’re ready for a challenge.”
Or, as he put it: “We prepare everything all year for this time period. It’s our Super Bowl, and I’m ready to play. Let’s get under the lights.”
Helping merchants say yes
A product goes viral on TikTok overnight. A new retailer comes calling. A promotion outperforms every forecast. Those are the moments merchants work all year for, and their 3PL should never be the reason they have to say no.
For Melissa, the answer comes down to one idea:
“The common theme is proactive versus reactive. We’re planning this all year long. We’re assuming that the influencer is going to pick up your product and it’s going to go viral. We’re assuming you’re going to have a record-breaking day you’ve never had before. We’re making all of those assumptions in the plan, because that’s why we exist.”
That mindset is built into how ShipMonk runs fulfillment. About two years ago, the company created domain teams that break fulfillment into 10 focus areas, each pushing continuous improvement instead of reacting to problems after they happen.
Franklin pointed to the reps ShipMonk has already put in. When inbound shipments arrive off-spec from receiving guidelines, or a sale suddenly brings 2,000 more orders than planned, the team has practiced pivoting fast. “Our ability to make smart decisions around how we adjust to the inbound forecast or to the order volume is something we’ve gotten a lot of repetition in,” he said.
The result is that merchants get to focus on what they do best. “People outsource to ShipMonk because they trust us to handle the operations,” Melissa said, “so they can focus on the sale, the influencers and the marketing, and not worry about this portion of it.”
Peak season keeps getting longer and less predictable. ShipMonk’s job is to make sure that whatever comes, our merchants are ready to say yes.
