Surge of online orders causes fulfillment, delivery delays, frustrates customers on Christmas
Shipping Delays Left Many People With Little to Put Under Tree … Many shoppers are blaming online retailers for stealing Christmas. — Companies from Amazon.com Inc. to Kohl's Corp …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third consecutive holiday season where online demand has overwhelmed retail infrastructure, but the failure point has moved. In 2007, Black Friday traffic snarled retailer websites themselves; by 2010, the story was simply that shoppers flocked to the web in record numbers. In 2013 the front-end held — the breakdown shifted downstream to warehouses, UPS and FedEx networks that couldn't absorb the final pre-Christmas order surge, leaving Amazon and Kohl's customers empty-handed on December 25.
The breadth of pickup matters: eight outlets including CNN, Business Insider and NBCNews carried the same-day story, and shoppers were framing it existentially — blaming online retailers for 'stealing Christmas.' That converts a logistics footnote into a brand-trust problem for the industry's biggest names right at the moment e-commerce had made Christmas-morning delivery a de facto promise.
First-order effects
- Amazon and Kohl's take direct customer-blame for deliveries promised but not delivered, putting immediate pressure on them to compensate affected shoppers and honor goodwill even though the physical failure sat with carriers.
- UPS and FedEx absorbed an order volume spike their peak-season plans didn't match, exposing capacity shortfalls precisely on the one date a miss is maximally visible.
Second-order effects
- Retailers will be pushed to tighten the coupling between their delivery promises and carrier commitments — guaranteed-by dates, cutoff times, and contingency routing — because the brand pays for the carrier's miss.
- Carriers face customer-level scrutiny of how they forecast and staff peak season, giving large shippers like Amazon leverage to demand dedicated capacity or contractual remedies.
Third-order effects
- If peak-volume failures recur, the economics favor retailers owning or dedicating more of the fulfillment chain themselves rather than renting general-purpose carrier capacity each December.
- 'Will it arrive by Christmas' becomes a competitive feature rather than a hope, making demonstrated peak-season recoverability a durable differentiator among online retailers.
The trend: E-commerce order growth keeps outrunning the shared physical infrastructure beneath it — first crashing websites in 2007, then warehouses and carrier networks in 2013 — pushing the biggest retailers toward control of their own logistics.