Peak season exposes shipping performance gaps that disappear once volume normalizes. The problem isn’t that teams don’t care. It’s that once the surge ends, the signal fades fast. Late deliveries become “just how peak goes.” Exception spikes get written off as weather. Cost overruns get buried inside blended averages.
A post-peak shipping audit helps you capture what really happened while the evidence is still fresh. This checklist walks through the specific areas that tend to break under peak pressure: volume flow, carrier reliability, exceptions, customer impact, technology stability, and cost exposure.
Unlike KPI tracking (what happened), this audit is about evaluation (why it happened) and translation (what you should change before the next peak). Treat it as the bridge between “we survived” and “we’re ready” for the next peak season.
How to Use this Checklist
To get real value from a post-peak audit, you need two things: a consistent time window and a consistent baseline.
1. Define Your Peak Window: Pick the exact dates you’re auditing (for example, Thanksgiving week through the final holiday cutoff), then lock it in so every team analyzes the same time period.
2. Choose a Baseline Window: Compare peak performance to a non-peak baseline (like August or a prior steady-state month). Peak numbers without a baseline are just anecdotes.
3. Segment Early: Break results down by channel, service level, region or lane, and key customer groups. Blended averages hide the real story.
4. End with Decisions: If the audit only documents findings, it will be forgotten. Your output should be a short list of committed changes: what you will do, who owns it, and when it ships.
1. Shipping Volume Patterns and Capacity Pickup Review
Review how shipping volume moved through the network during peak season to identify where demand exceeded expectations, created execution strain, or exposed gaps in planning assumptions.
What to Review and Analyze:
- Forecasted vs. actual shipping volume by day and week
- Volume spikes tied to promotions, channels, or seasonal events
- Peak-to-average shipment volume patterns
- Backlog indicators or recurring cut-off pressure during peak periods
What teams often miss: The “shape” of volume matters as much as total volume. A steady 20% increase is very different from a few extreme spike days that blow up cutoffs and carrier pickups. Spikes often correlate with downstream failures. If service level misses cluster around a few dates, you likely have a cutoff-management or carrier pickup-capacity issue, not a carrier transit issue.
Update forecasting assumptions and peak playbooks based on the biggest variance drivers, promo behavior, channel mix shifts, and service-level changes. Build peak plans around the spike days, not the average day. This analysis supports your volume performance review by explaining downstream disruption, service-level misses, and cost exposure.
2. Carrier Performance Review During Peak Shipping
Peak season reveals carrier reliability under pressure in ways normal volume won’t. The goal is to separate “carrier had a bad week” from “carrier is a structural risk when volume surges.”
What to Review and Analyze:
- On-time delivery performance compared to non-peak baselines
- Primary delay drivers (weather events, carrier capacity limits, misroutes)
- Regional or lane-level performance variance
- Cost-to-service tradeoffs by carrier and service level
- Pickup failures, delayed pickups, or carrier capacity rejections during peak
Look for consistency, not perfection. A carrier that’s fine overall but collapses in specific lanes is a silent peak-season liability. Separate service failures from allocation mistakes. Sometimes the carrier didn’t fail; you overloaded a service tier or region that was already constrained.
Use this analysis to rebalance allocation rules for peak (primary vs backup carriers, lane-level diversification, service-level guardrails). Peak scorecards give you leverage in contract conversations and capacity commitments. This shows you where carrier mix, allocation, or contract terms should be reevaluated before the next peak.
3. Shipping Exceptions and Disruptions Analysis
Exceptions spike during peak season, but not all spikes point to the same problem. The goal is to determine which exceptions were avoidable and which require systematic fixes.
What to Review and Analyze:
- Exception volume by type (delivery delays, damages, incorrect addresses, failed deliveries)
- Cost impact associated with exceptions (surcharges, reships, service effort)
- Exception concentration by carrier, lane, or service level
- Time-to-detection and time-to-resolution during peak periods
What teams often miss: Volume-driven exceptions are not the same as preventable exceptions. If you lump everything together, you’ll fix the wrong thing. Concentration is the giveaway: if 60% of a problem comes from one carrier, one zone, or one service level, you have a targeted fix, not a company-wide initiative.
Prioritize the top 2-3 exception types by both cost and customer impact, rather than just by count. Build preventive controls like address validation, smarter service-level selection, and earlier disruption detection. Exception patterns often point to upstream data quality, routing, or carrier issues that need to be fixed before the next peak.
4. Customer Experience and Visibility Gaps
Customer complaints during peak season tell you which operational failures hurt retention the most. WISMO (Where is my order?) inquiries, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) scores, and refund requests quantify how shipping performance translated into customer friction and service workload.
What to Review and Analyze:
- Volume and timing of WISMO inquiries during peak periods
- Shifts in customer satisfaction or loyalty scores (or qualitative customer feedback)
- Common complaint themes tied to delays, exceptions, or tracking gaps
- Refund, reshipment, or adjustment trends linked to service failures
- Changes in customer response times during peak compared to baseline
WISMO spikes usually indicate a visibility problem, not just a delivery problem. If tracking is delayed, inconsistent, or unclear, customers reach out earlier and more often. Look for specific failure moments. Was it late pickup confirmation, missing scans, failed delivery attempts, or exceptions that didn’t resolve?
Tighten proactive communication triggers tied to exceptions and scan gaps. Improve tracking quality and clarity before you invest in more customer service. This connects shipping execution issues to downstream customer impact and service workload.
5. Shipping Technology and System Stability Review
Evaluate whether shipping technology and integrations remained stable under peak-season load, and identify where system issues contributed to delays, data gaps, or execution inefficiencies.
What to Review and Analyze:
- Carrier integration error frequency during peak periods (rate shopping, label creation, or tracking updates)
- Rate-shopping delays tied to system performance
- Tracking event consistency, latency, or missing scans
- System response time or processing slowdowns under peak load
What teams often miss: Small outages create high downstream costs during peak. Even brief integration failures can cause label reprints, delayed handoffs, or lost visibility, triggering customer contact. Latency is a hidden killer because if events arrive late, your team reacts late, and exception resolution time stretches.
Prioritize integration hardening and monitoring before the next peak: error alerting, fallback flows, and carrier connectivity redundancy where needed. Address the top 1-2 failure points that have caused the most operational disruptions. This identifies where instability or integration failures affected execution and visibility during peak season.
6. Shipping Cost and Margin Exposure Audit
Peak season cost increases aren’t always inevitable. Some are unavoidable (peak surcharges), but many trace to preventable issues: poor carrier allocation, dimensional weight inefficiencies, or long-zone shipments that better routing would avoid.
What to Review and Analyze:
- Cost per shipment or order by channel or service level
- Frequency and impact of dimensional weight, oversize, and accessorial fees
- Long-zone or high-cost shipment patterns during peak periods
- Surcharge and accessorial cost concentration by carrier
- Return-driven shipping cost increases
Concentration matters. If most accessorial spend comes from a handful of shipment profiles, you have an opportunity to optimize packaging and service levels. Cost-to-service is the real comparison; a cheaper carrier that drives more exceptions can cost more when you factor in reships and service workload.
Adjust allocation and routing rules for peak profiles that drove the biggest margin hit. Prioritize packaging and dimensional optimization opportunities with clear ROI. This clarifies where margin variance occurred and which operational changes deliver the highest return.
7. Post-Peak Action Planning and Next-Season Shipping Readiness
Turn findings into committed changes before they’re forgotten: carrier reallocations, packaging fixes, contingency plans, and cost negotiations that prevent next peak season from repeating this peak season’s problems.
What to Review and Analyze:
- Updated forecasting assumptions based on peak-season performance
- Carrier allocation or service-level adjustments informed by reliability and cost outcomes
- Packaging or dimensional optimization opportunities identified during peak
- Scenario modeling for volume, cost, and routing changes
- Updates to contingency plans for weather events or carrier capacity constraints
Make the action plan real: A useful action plan is not a list of ideas. It’s a short set of decisions with owners. Aim for the top 5 changes you’re committing to before the next peak, an owner for each change (a person, not a team), a deadline and definition of success, and a measurement that proves the change worked.
This converts insights into prioritized actions that strengthen readiness for the next peak season.
Conducting Your Post-Peak Shipping Audit
A post-peak shipping audit is most effective when it moves beyond documentation and drives consistent improvement. By systematically reviewing volume flow, carrier performance, exceptions, customer impact, technology stability, cost exposure, and action planning, teams gain a clear view of where peak-season performance faltered and where risk accumulated.
Businesses that perform well during peak treat the retrospective as an ongoing operating discipline, not a one-time exercise. The key is acting before peak-season context fades and issues get normalized.
Download the Post-Peak Shipping Audit Checklist to capture what happened now, align on root causes, and lock in the changes you want in place before the next surge.
