clevedon:

andrewNZ:

MichaelNZ:

andrewNZ:
I really can't emphasize enough just how hard it is to predict volumes. All you have to go on is historical volumes, guesswork and witchcraft.

Tell me more - is this white or black magick?

It's a mix, grey.


Here's how it works. (random values ahead)

Black friday last year, you had 1000 items per day for two weeks (a sizable increase in volume), and your service has increased in popularity five fold since then. That's a rough value of 5000 items per day.

Say a person processes 500 items per day, you'll need 10 people.

Your gut says it'll be bigger so you get all 15 people available to be safe. A 50% buffer is pretty respectable.


On day 2 you are massively behind, and when you tally up you discover that the previous days total was 10000.

You are now losing ground at a rate of 2500 items a day. By the end of the fortnight you'll have 25000 carryover that you have to process on top of normal volumes.

Nice story, but most of the bad feedback of YouShop currently is there is not so much the delay in them actually shipping items they have in hand, but acknowledging they actually have them in the first place. Why aren't parcels scanned when they are off loaded at the YouShop warehouse, signed for and received and customer notified - like very other freighting company does. Yes it's a busy time of year and I'm not really phased by delays because of that, but for me it took them six days to say they had my parcel after they actually had it.

UPS, FedEx etc notify at every parcel movement, item gets to YouShop and the trail goes cold.