Peak Season 2025: Everything You Need to Know for Smooth Q4 Operations

The peak and holiday season is approaching, which means that order volumes are expected to increase significantly, and logistics can become quite stressful. To keep things under control during this busy period, we have designed the byrd peak season guidelines to make everything run smoothly. 

Please read the information below carefully to learn more about this year’s peak season guidelines.

Inbound Deliveries

Although we put great emphasis on processing your inbound deliveries in a timely manner, we will prioritise the outbound shipments during the very busy weeks which means that the inbounding of your deliveries might be delayed if they arrive in the weeks highlighted below.

Therefore, we encourage you to arrange deliveries to restock your inventory early enough, ideally already in October, to make sure that you are not running out of stock. 

Please take note of the following when announcing these deliveries:

• You must announce on your dashboard all deliveries that will arrive in November by the 31st of October 2025

• You must announce on your dashboard all deliveries that will arrive in December by the 28th of November 2025

Weeks with Extended Inbounding SLA’s:

• Calendar weeks 47/48/49 (20/11 - 06/12) 
• Calendar weeks 51/52 (15/12 - 27/12)

Deliveries that meet the requirements of our byrd delivery standards, and arrive before these weeks, will be processed according to the inbounding SLA‘s.

Deliveries that arrive at the warehouse during these weeks (with extended inbounding SLA’s), will still be accepted, but the receiving of this stock will not be prioritized. 

Furthermore, the approval from byrd will be needed to accept container deliveries in the warehouses and unpalletized containers will most likely not be accepted during weeks 49 and 50. 

On the week 50, our warehouses will dedicate some workforce to the inbound of your deliveries. However, depending on the workload, we might not be able to stick to our SLA. 

From the first week of 2026, we are going to resume the inbounding of deliveries with the standard SLAs at the warehouse and will prioritize them based on the arrival date. 

Please ensure that all parts of the announced delivery arrive together. If parts of your delivery arrive on different days, a separate delivery announcement is required for each arriving part. 

Outbound Shipments & Forecasts 

In order to avoid bottlenecks in the warehouse, we encourage you to submit the shipment volume forecasting data, which will help us to plan the fulfilment capacities in advance. 

Sharing this information with us is crucial to understand when your shipping volume will increase or decrease resulting from sales, new product launches and marketing campaigns. 

Beyond submitting your shipment forecasts, we strongly encourage you to share any upcoming marketing activities that could impact your volumes. This includes planned product launches (with details such as quantity, product size, and timing), campaigns focused on specific products or any potential increase of items per orders. To ensure we can support you in the best possible way, we highly recommend reaching out to your Account Manager with these details in advance.

More information about peak season guidelines: 

• Pre-commissioning of products or other special requests (relabeling, stock count, etc) will not be possible during peak season unless agreed upon by 31st October, or should be done before the end of October if possible.
• As a reminder, once an order has been picked, it cannot be cancelled anymore. 
• Following the  byrd delivery standards is essential to ensure your products are inbounded without delays.
• Any delivery delays must be communicated to us in advance via the byrd service hub.
• Returns will continue to be processed during peak; however, since outbound shipments remain our top priority, return processing may take longer than usual and will not be prioritised.

Carriers updates

• Carrier cut-off dates will be shared with you as soon as they are confirmed by the carriers. See below. 

• Some carriers may apply a special “peak surcharge” on shipments during the last months of the year. As soon as we receive updates, we will publish the links in the following bullets points below for the different carriers :

  • DHL
  • DHL Express

Carrier Cutoff Dates

To be announced by carriers in the coming weeks.