“Shippageddon” first entered the retail industry lexicon in late 2020, describing a conflation of global supply chain issues that led many brands and retailers to be under-stocked or otherwise unable to fulfill customer demand for purchases last year. A year later, many of those issues have not been resolved, and there are new hazards to deal with. Retail brands are preparing for round two of Shippageddon. 

The term Shippageddon was first coined in late 2020 on an episode of the retail podcast The Jason And Scot Show: ”We were talking about the likely e-commerce peak we expected from the holiday, on top of the e-commerce peak we were already seeing due to Covid-19, and we felt like retailers were likely to run into shipping capacity issues,” said the hosts of the show.

And the alarm that retail experts sounded did in fact bear out. Shoppers were indeed met with stock-outs, longer delivery timelines from all carriers, and less overall discounting ahead of the holidays. But the outlook doesn’t look much better for 2021. 

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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

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