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Peak Velocity.
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Canadian e-commerce peak is not a single date, it is a six-week compression that starts before most brands think it does. The consumer peak runs from the Black Friday weekend through to the last reliable delivery date in the third week of December, but the freight peak sits well ahead of it. Inventory has to be received, put away and available to pick before the first order is placed, which means the inbound replenishment freight that supports a November peak is moving in early October. Brands that plan backwards from the consumer calendar rather than the receiving calendar arrive late by a month.

Capacity behaves differently in that window. Less-than-truckload networks run at or near full through October and November, so a shipment that normally clears Toronto to Calgary in five days can sit an extra day in a terminal waiting for a trailer with room on it. Appointment lead times at third-party fulfilment centres in Mississauga, Brampton and Milton stretch from same-week to a week or more. Spot pricing on the busy inbound lanes climbs, and carriers protect their contracted freight first. The practical answer is to book earlier than feels necessary, tender volume consistently rather than in bursts, and give carriers a forecast they can plan around.

Import flow is the other half of it. Containers landing at Vancouver, Prince Rupert or Montreal ahead of peak arrive into terminals that are already busy, and free time is short. A container that sits past its free days accrues demurrage at the terminal and per-diem on the equipment, and both are avoidable with an appointment booked before the vessel berths rather than after. Where volume justifies it, transloading into domestic trailers at the port and running the freight inland as a single truckload is faster and cheaper than moving each container to the fulfilment centre and back.

Contingency is what separates a peak that works from one that does not. For every lane that matters we keep a second carrier that has actually run the lane, we clear cross-border shipments before they reach the border rather than at it, and we hold a partial-truckload option for the shipment that is too urgent to wait for an LTL slot. None of that is exotic. It just has to be arranged in September, not in the week it is needed.

Once your freight reaches a marketplace or national retail distribution centre, it stops being judged on transit time and starts being judged at the receiving door. Every major receiver publishes a routing guide that sets out how shipments must be booked, built, labelled and documented, and those rules are enforced by people with a scanner and a clipboard. A trailer that does not comply is either turned away or received under protest with a chargeback attached. Neither outcome is recoverable after the fact, so the compliance work belongs at the point the shipment is planned.

Appointments come first. Marketplace and retail receivers require the carrier to book a delivery slot through their portal against the purchase order or shipment identifier, and a truck that arrives without one is refused at the gate. In a normal month a missed appointment costs a day. In peak it can cost a week, because the next available slot is genuinely a week out. We book the appointment ourselves, confirm it in writing, and give you the confirmation reference so the delivery is traceable on your side as well as ours.

How the pallet is built matters as much as when it arrives. Receivers specify pallet height, overhang, wrap, whether a pallet may carry more than one purchase order, and where the pallet placard has to sit so it is scannable without breaking the load down. Carton labels have to be readable and in the right place. These specifications differ between receivers and they change, so we work from the current routing guide for that receiver rather than from what was true last year, and we flag a build that will not pass before the trailer is loaded rather than after it is rejected.

Finally there is the delivery window itself. Most large receivers score suppliers on on-time and in-full performance, and in those programmes arriving early is treated as a miss in the same way arriving late is. That changes which carrier you want on the lane. A carrier that can hold a window and communicate a delay four hours before it happens is worth more than one that is nominally faster and shows up when it shows up. That is the filter we apply when we tender your inbound freight.

Returns are a freight problem before they are a customer service problem, and most e-commerce brands only discover that in January. The volume that arrives back after the holidays is not a trickle, it is a wave that lands in a three-week window on a fulfilment operation that has just spent six weeks shipping outbound. If the reverse flow has not been designed in advance it defaults to the most expensive possible form: individual parcels moving one at a time, at parcel rates, into a receiving dock with no plan for them.

The fix is consolidation. Returns collected at a regional point and moved back to your distribution centre as palletised freight cost a fraction of what the same units cost as individual parcels, and they arrive in a form the receiving team can actually process. That works whether the collection point is a return centre, a retail location or a third-party site, and it scales with volume rather than against it. The decision that makes it possible is choosing the consolidation point before peak, so the labels going out in November already point at it.

Cross-border returns need their own handling. Goods that were exported from Canada and are coming back can often re-enter without duty being paid twice, but only if the paperwork supports it, which means keeping the original export record and entry documents and being able to tie the returning goods to them. That is a records discipline more than a customs one, and it is far easier to maintain from the start than to reconstruct in March. Your broker will confirm the treatment that applies to your goods, and we will make sure the freight documentation lines up with it.

The last decision is disposition, and the freight follows it rather than leading it. A unit that will be restocked, a unit that will be refurbished and a unit that will be liquidated each want to end up somewhere different, and moving everything to one location and sorting it there adds a leg that often did not need to exist. Deciding the disposition rules before peak lets the reverse network route to the right endpoint the first time. It is the cheapest change available in reverse logistics and the one most often left until it is too late to make.