Should Your Stores Ship Online Orders This Peak? What to Settle Before Black Friday, White Friday and Christmas
Black Friday falls on 27 November this year and Cyber Monday on 30 November, and for readers in the Gulf the White Friday window will probably sit around the same dates, since last year's ran from 20 to 30 November and this year's had not been announced when we wrote this. Adobe expects United States online sales of $275.1 billion between 1 November and 31 December, up 6.7% on last year, with $47.5 billion of that in the five days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday. Bain expects UK online sales to grow 7.5% in November and December against 2.8% in store.
For a growing number of retailers, those orders are increasingly coming from the store. Walmart's chief financial officer told analysts in August that stores "are the last mile fulfillment nodes for 80% of our e-commerce orders and 100% of our fast deliveries". Target's same-day services passed $14 billion in fiscal 2025 and made up two-thirds of its e-commerce sales, and its chief executive said in March that "store investment is supply chain investment for us because of the role the stores play". Dick's Sporting Goods said in March 2025 that its stores fulfil about 80% of online sales. So the question for most retailers is no longer whether stores can ship online orders, but whether yours should this peak, for which orders, and what has to be true first.
The case is mostly about distance
A store is usually closer to the customer than a distribution centre, and a shorter last mile is cheaper and faster. Shipium, a shipping software vendor, published a study of its own 28 retail customers in March and found that store shipments cost about 70% of a warehouse shipment and that 95% of them delivered within carrier zones one and two. That is vendor data about a self-selected group, so we would not generalise the percentages, but the demand is there: Deloitte's 2026 holiday survey of 4,000 US consumers found that 26% want same-day delivery, rising to 37% among Gen Z.
The qualification comes from Target itself. On the same call, its chief executive said some stores have the backroom capacity to specialise in e-commerce and that "we don't need every store shipping boxes". Shipium's data agrees: among retailers already shipping from stores, the store share of volume ranged from 5% to 85%, with a median of 32%. Ship-from-store at the retailers who do it well is selective, order by order and store by store.
Stock accuracy at the store comes first
Everything downstream depends on the store stock figure being roughly right, and in a store, unlike a warehouse, it often is not. Zebra's 2025 Global Shopper Study found that 52% of shoppers left a store without all the items they intended to buy, and that 84% of retail decision-makers now rank real-time inventory synchronisation as a top priority.
The most instructive case is older. In late 2022 Nordstrom scaled back store fulfilment at its Rack banner because inventory-accuracy problems were driving cancellations, and its chief executive said in March 2023 that "eliminating costly Rack store-based order fulfillment and raising the minimum order amount" had "reduced order cancellations, simplified Rack operations, and improved Rack profitability". The lesson is probably not that store fulfilment fails, but that a store with unreliable stock cancels orders, and a cancelled order in peak is worse than a slower one. The retailers doing this at scale fixed the data first; Inditex said in September it had rolled its soft-tag RFID across all 5,444 stores. The practical answer is a buffer: a store should not be allocated its last unit of anything, and the buffer should be larger where the count is less trusted.
Capacity and staffing in peak trading
The second thing to settle is whether the store has anyone to pick. Seasonal hiring is down this year. Challenger, Gray & Christmas expects roughly 450,000 seasonal US retail jobs in the fourth quarter, about 2.5% fewer than 2025, which was itself the smallest since 2008. NRF expects 325,000 to 375,000 seasonal hires against an estimated 356,000 last year, and Dick's plans more than 11,000, about 20% fewer than it planned for 2025.
Best Buy resolved that tension in 2023 by moving the other way. Its chief executive said then that ship-from-store volume was at its lowest share "since well before the pandemic", with about 62% of small parcels shipped from automated distribution centres so that store staff could focus on customer-facing services such as in-store sales and order pickups, as Retail Dive summarised it. Best Buy's stores still handled 43% of online sales through pickup, but a store's capacity in peak is a real number, it falls on the busiest trading days exactly when online demand rises, and an engine with no idea of that number will keep sending orders to a store whose staff stopped picking at midday. What follows from that is a realistic view of how much each store can pick in a day, cut-off times tied to the store's hours and the carrier's pickup, and a way to take a store out of the pool for a day. Mall stores in the Gulf have one more constraint, which is that the mall's loading hours and the store's hours are not the same thing.
Splits, and what each extra parcel costs this year
A split happens when a store has only part of an order. We could not find a current public figure for how often that happens or what it costs, so we will reason from the carrier tariffs, which are public and higher this year. UPS's peak demand surcharge on ground residential and air packages runs from 25 October to 16 January at $0.50 to $2.50 per package; FedEx's residential demand surcharge runs from 26 October to 17 January at $0.50 to $0.80, up from $0.65 at the top end last year; USPS's peak increase averages 6% from 4 October to 17 January. Each applies per parcel, so a split order pays the rate, the surcharge and the packaging twice, and the second parcel is usually the late one. Nordstrom's higher minimum order for free ship-to-store at Rack was a version of the same judgment: below a certain order value, the extra handling is not worth it.
Pickups, the promise, and the parcel that comes back
A carrier collecting from forty stores is a different service from one collecting from a warehouse, and it has to be agreed and scheduled; a pickup that was requested but never confirmed is the usual reason a store-fulfilled parcel sits behind the till for two days. The store's hours, the carrier's collection window and the same-day cut-off have to agree before the parcel is promised to anyone, because customers choose on the promise: Narvar's 2025 holiday survey of more than 2,000 US consumers found that 53% say estimated delivery dates influence their choice of retailer, and project44's 2025 survey found 56% refuse to pay for faster shipping.
Returns are the last piece. NRF and Happy Returns projected $849.9 billion of returns in 2025, with 19.3% of online sales returned and retailers expecting 17% of holiday sales to come back. A share of what a store ships will come back to a store, and if it is not received into that store's count quickly it will either be sold twice or sit in a back room through January.
When not to allocate to a store
Putting those together gives a shorter list than the enthusiasm for stores would suggest. An order should probably not go to a store when the store's count of that item is at or below its buffer; when the store has no picking capacity left for the day or has passed its cut-off for the carrier's pickup; when the order would split and its value does not cover a second parcel; when the item is bulky, fragile or restricted and the store is not set up to pack it; when the order has been flagged for review on value, address or payment; and when the store is closed, on a blackout date, or simply not in the pool that week. They are the conditions under which the retailers who do this well keep the store out of the decision, and most can be written as rules in advance.
Our reading of the 2025 and 2026 evidence is that ship-from-store has become normal practice at the retailers with the best store data, clear rules on capacity and splits, and carrier arrangements settled in October, and that it has been quietly scaled back wherever one of those was missing. On Friday we will go through how those rules, from allocation rules to carrier pickups, are handled on Carriyo as one order management and shipping system.
Carriyo is The Intelligent Commerce Platform, from checkout to doorstep.
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Sources
1. Adobe. "Adobe: U.S. Holiday Shopping Season to Hit Record $275.1 Billion Online, Rising 6.7% YoY" (press release, 28 September 2026): $275.1 billion, up 6.7%; Cyber Week $47.5 billion; Cyber Monday 30 November. https://news.adobe.com/news/downloads/pdfs/2026/09/adi-holiday-forecast-release-9-28.pdf 2. Retail Times. "UK Christmas spending set for strongest rise in four years, says Bain & Co" (21 October 2026): online +7.5%, in-store +2.8%. https://retailtimes.co.uk/uk-christmas-spending-set-for-strongest-rise-in-four-years-says-bain-co/ 3. Khaleej Times. "UAE shoppers to spend 3 times more than Mena average during White Friday 2025" (27 November 2025): White Friday window 20 to 30 November 2025. https://www.khaleejtimes.com/uae/uae-shopping-trends-white-friday-2025-mena 4. Walmart. Q2 FY27 earnings call transcript (20 August 2026), John David Rainey: stores "are the last mile fulfillment nodes for 80% of our e-commerce orders and 100% of our fast deliveries"; https://earningswhispers.com/transcript/WMT/Q22027 ; Walmart release: https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2026/08/20/walmart-releases-q2-fy27-earnings 5. Digital Commerce 360. "Target online sales grow amid continued overall sales decline in Q4 2025" (4 March 2026): same-day services more than $14 billion in fiscal 2025, two-thirds of e-commerce sales; Michael Fiddelke quotes. https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2026/03/04/target-online-sales-ecommerce-q4-2025/ 6. The Motley Fool. "Dick's Sporting Goods revenue jumps 5%" (11 March 2025): stores fulfil 80% of online sales. https://www.fool.com/data-news/2025/03/11/dicks-sporting-goods-revenue-jumps-5 7. Shipium. "The store as the new fulfillment center: how retailers are slashing costs in 2026" (25 March 2026), vendor study of 28 retail customers: store shipments about 70% of warehouse cost; 95% in zones 1 and 2; store share of volume 5% to 85%, median 32%. https://shipium.com/blog/the-store-as-the-new-fulfillment-center-how-retailers-are-slashing-costs-in-2026 8. Deloitte. "Deloitte: Holiday Spending Set to Increase 4% While Shoppers Focus on Value" (2026 Holiday Retail Survey press release, 15 October 2026): 4,000 US consumers; 26% want same-day delivery, 37% among Gen Z. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/about/press-room/deloitte-holiday-spending-set-to-increase.html 9. Zebra Technologies. 18th Annual Global Shopper Study (11 November 2025, via MarketScreener): 52% of shoppers left without all intended items; 84% of decision-makers prioritise real-time inventory synchronisation. https://www.marketscreener.com/news/zebra-technologies-corporation-unveils-the-findings-of-its-18th-annual-global-shopper-study-ce7d5fded888ff23 10. Retail Dive. "Nordstrom Rack slows store-based fulfillment" (12 December 2022). https://www.retaildive.com/news/nordstrom-rack-slows-in-store-fulfillment/638464 11. The Motley Fool. Nordstrom Q4 2022 earnings call transcript (2 March 2023), Erik Nordstrom quote. https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2023/03/02/nordstrom-jwn-q4-2022-earnings-call-transcript/ 12. TheIndustry.fashion. "Inditex sales climb 7.6% as Zara owner steps up UK expansion" (9 September 2026): soft-tag RFID across all stores; 5,444 stores. https://www.theindustry.fashion/inditex-sales-climb-7-6-as-zara-owner-steps-up-uk-expansion/ 13. HR Dive. "Holiday hiring is getting 'smaller and more surgical'" (5 October 2026), citing Challenger, Gray & Christmas: about 450,000 jobs, down 2.5% from 461,500. https://www.hrdive.com/news/holiday-seasonal-retail-hiring-lower/832117/ 14. National Retail Federation. "NRF forecasts 2026 holiday sales growth as consumers remain resilient" (15 October 2026): 325,000 to 375,000 seasonal hires versus 356,000. https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/nrf-forecasts-2026-holiday-sales-growth-as-consumers-remain-resilient 15. Retail Dive. "Dick's Sporting Goods' seasonal hiring slips" (19 October 2026): more than 11,000 versus 14,000. https://retaildive.com/news/dicks-sporting-goods-seasonal-hiring-down/833348 16. Retail Dive. "Best Buy increases reliance on distribution centers for customer delivery" (6 December 2023), Corie Barry quote; 62% from automated distribution centres; 43% of online sales picked up in store. https://retaildive.com/news/best-buy-distribution-centers-ship-from-store-sales/701697 17. Supply Chain Dive. "UPS preps higher holiday surcharges for 2026" (27 August 2026). https://supplychaindive.com/news/ups-preps-higher-holiday-surcharges-for-2026/828936 18. Supply Chain Dive. "FedEx unveils 2026 peak season fees, higher home delivery prices loom" (23 July 2026). https://supplychaindive.com/news/fedex-unveils-2026-peak-season-fees-higher-home-delivery-prices-loom/826049 19. Retail Dive. "USPS announces 6% rate increase for 2026 peak season" (31 August 2026): 6% average, 4 October to 17 January. https://www.retaildive.com/news/usps-increase-2026-peak-season-holidays/828858/ 20. Chain Drug Review. "Narvar Holiday Data: Shoppers worry they can't afford gifts" (14 October 2025): 53% say estimated delivery dates influence retailer choice. https://chaindrugreview.com/narvar-holiday-data-shoppers-worry-they-cant-afford-gifts 21. project44. "State of Consumer Holiday Shopping 2025": 56% refuse to pay for faster shipping. https://www.project44.com/resources/state-of-consumer-holiday-shopping-2025/ 22. National Retail Federation and Happy Returns. "Consumers expected to return nearly $850 billion in merchandise in 2025" (15 October 2025): $849.9 billion; 19.3% of online sales; 17% of holiday sales. https://nrf.com/media-center/press-releases/consumers-expected-to-return-nearly-850-billion-in-merchandise-in-2025