Opinion: Cross-Border Growth Starts Before the Holiday Peak Season

Black Friday-Cyber Monday kicks off a sustained peak period that runs through Christmas, post-holiday returns, and New Year’s promotions. For e-commerce and retail brands shipping cross-border, this extended peak adds pressure well beyond inventory positioning, carrier capacity, and final-mile delivery. It tests whether thousands of individual orders can clear customs and reach doorsteps at nearly the pace consumers expect domestic orders to move.

With orders embarking on a complex cross-border journey filled with documentation, duty and tax calculations, customs processing, carrier handoffs, and delivery challenges, retailers need clarity before orders ever leave the warehouse. They need to ensure their delivery network, and the data and processes that support it, can perform under sustained high pressure. And they need to act now. Late-summer-to-early-fall is the last window retailers have to spot weak points, test processes, and establish clear escalation paths before the first BFCM orders are placed.

The goal is simple: keep cross-border delivery predictable for customers throughout peak. The answers to these four questions will help brands determine whether they can achieve this:

No. 1: Can Our Network Handle High Demand from BFCM Past the New Year?

Last holiday season, U.S. consumers spent a record $257.8 billion online from Nov. 1 through Dec. 31, up 6.8% year over year, according to Adobe. The momentum has continued. During the four-day Prime Day event from this June 23 to 26, U.S. retailers generated $26.4 billion in online sales. That’s a 9.3% increase from the year prior. This signals another potentially record-volume season ahead, giving retailers even more reason to stress-test their delivery networks now.

But retailers shouldn’t simply plan for the BFCM spike. Cross-border demand will start in early November and remain elevated for weeks, with shifting order patterns around shipping cutoffs, last-minute gifting, post-holiday promotions, and even returns.

Brands need to assess their expected demand across the full holiday period including:

• The kick-off holiday sales window from Black Friday through Cyber Monday.
• The weeks leading up to Christmas and last-minute holiday orders.
• Post-Christmas and New Year’s demand including returns and exchanges.

It’s vital that brands determine now whether their current carrier capacity, customs-processing support, and final-mile coverage can handle sustained volume, not just a single surge. They should also understand how quickly partners on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border can flex when demand exceeds forecasts, whether capacity is guaranteed, and where service levels are most vulnerable. The answers here will reveal if a brand’s network can survive long past one busy weekend to maintain reliable delivery performance through to the final holiday return.

No. 2: Where Could the Cross-Border Journey Break Down?

Peak season isn’t the time to discover where cross-border processes break. Those should already be identified, remedied, and with plans in place should issues rise again.

Brands should map the journey from checkout to doorstep and identify the points where an order can be delayed or suddenly become more expensive than expected. It means in addition to documentation, calculations, and handoffs, brands need to examine their data and the compliance processes that determine whether a shipment can clear a border without surprise. They should look closely at:

• Product classification and country-of-origin data
• Customs documentation and declaration accuracy
• Duties, taxes, and landed-cost calculations
• Carrier handoffs on both sides of the border
• Customs clearance and exception-resolution workflows
• Final-mile delivery networks in destination markets

Brands can review what happened during last year’s holiday surges but shouldn’t assume that last year’s processes reflect this year’s regulatory environment. With trade rules and tariffs in a constant state of flux, they need to understand requirements before shipping, not after.

That starts with the basics: every product must be accurately classified, declared, valued, and cleared under the rules of its destination market. The end of the de minimis exemption has raised the stakes for lower-value ecommerce orders entering the U.S., and a federal trade court’s decision to uphold the change means retailers shouldn't expect relief this peak season.

By identifying failures, laying out resolutions along the journey, and addressing preventable issues now, brands can avoid having the BFCM surge make problems harder to contain.

No. 3: Can We Maintain Visibility When Orders Cross Borders?

Cross-border shipment handoffs create more potential failures than domestic orders. During peak, this means visibility must confirm more than a package’s movement. Visibility should help brands understand whether an order is on time, what’s causing a delay, and who’s resolving it.

Brands should be able to quickly identify whether an exception stems from a customs documentation, duty payment, carrier transfer, or final-mile issue. They should have a planned response for each so customers aren’t left waiting for a customer-service response.

This starts by evaluating whether their current system and partners can provide:

• Accurate duty, tax, and tariff calculations at the SKU and destination levels
• End-to-end tracking across borders and multiple carrier handoffs
• Accurate delivery estimates across destination markets
• Visibility into customs clearance status and shipment exceptions
• Alerts that signal internal teams to intervene before a promise is missed
• Proactive customer communication when order statuses change

Better visibility across cost and communications from a brand’s warehouse to the customer’s doorstep makes deliveries, and their inevitable exceptions, easier to manage.

No. 4: Is Our Delivery Network Built for the Market We're Trying to Grow?

The holiday shopping season provides a make-or-break opportunity for brands to acquire customers across borders. To retain those international customers, however, they need to build a cross-border network and partnerships that smoothly function past December.

Consider holiday demand becoming the baseline demand for next year. Can their current network scale alongside customer growth without adding operational costs and complexities?

That answer lies within a brand’s partnerships. They need partners that can provide:

• Flexible capacity during periods of fluctuating and sustained demand
• Reliable and proven customs expertise and cross-border operations support
• Consistent service from origination through to destination markets
• Regional and local delivery expertise with strong last-mile coverage
• Scalable technology for product data, duty calculations, and tracking
• Full-order visibility and clear exceptions management and escalation plans

The months leading up to BFCM can be used to test whether the delivery network can support long-term, cross-border growth through every shift, not just heightened holiday volume.

Make the First Cross-Border Order Count

E-commerce and retail brands still have time to strengthen their cross-border operations before the BFCM rush, but the time to do so is closing in. They need to act now.

By taking early-fall to evaluate potential breakdowns, capacity, customs readiness, visibility, technology, and network scalability, brands can make cross-border delivery easier to manage from Black Friday through New Year’s Day and beyond.

Jax Zheng is Director of Strategic Partnerships at UniUni and former CEO of Shippie. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent those of The Supply Chainer or its editorial team.