Three quarters of online retailers (74 percent) fear that parcel services will be overloaded this Christmas season. That comes from a survey published on Tuesday by the dealer association. Bottlenecks in the logistical area were therefore the greatest concern of dealers in the most important sales time of the year in 2021 as well.
Compared to previous years, however, the number of dealers who feared an overload of delivery services declined slightly. A year ago, as many as 81 percent of retailers believed that delivery services could reach their capacity limits. The e-commerce association suspected that these fears have lessened a little because of the investments that delivery services have recently made in optimizing their offerings. Almost every second retailer (45 percent) also named the lower availability of goods due to the problems in global supply chains as a possible stumbling block in this Christmas season.
Overall, according to the survey, online retailers are not quite as euphoric as in the corona year 2020. Only every third retailer reported positive pandemic effects on their own business. A year ago it was more than half of the e-commerce providers. By contrast, around 38 percent of the retailers surveyed stated that the coronavirus was damaging their business (previous year: 22 percent). Only 43 percent of retailers expect higher sales than in the previous Christmas business. In the previous year, 56 percent did so. Every fifth online retailer surveyed even anticipates a drop in sales.