The holiday season shipping checklist: 6 things to fix before peak season
Peak season doesn’t create new shipping and fulfillment problems. It just makes your existing ones expensive. Most sellers won’t look at their shipping setup until orders start piling up—and by then, fixing anything takes triple the time and causes triple the stress it would have today.
The problems that derail peak season aren’t difficult to fix, but they create significant harm when you don't address them before it's too late.
Getting peak season right isn't a competitive advantage anymore. It's a baseline requirement. Nearly half of merchants start preparing for peak season at least two months early, and 25% of merchants say peak season accounts for more than 40% of their annual revenue (ShipStation's 2026 Merchant Insights Report), which only emphasizes the importance of acting now.
Run through this peak-season shipping checklist from ShipStation now, and the hardest part of the holiday season becomes the volume itself, not the operational fires beneath it.
1. Check your carrier account connections
Verify that every carrier account in your shipping platform is still connected, pulling in live rates, and working properly. From a password change to a credential update, carrier connections can break quietly. Oftentimes, you won’t discover the problem until you’re sending packages at 3 times your normal pace.
If you're using negotiated carrier rates, ensure they are actually showing up, especially if you have volume-based discounts or contracts with UPS, FedEx, or USPS. A 10-cent-per-label gap that’s invisible in August becomes significant across 10,000 holiday shipments.
2. Audit your shipping automation rules
Shipping automation rules are the backbone of an efficient peak operation. They’re also the part of your setup most likely to be out of date.
Pull up your list of automation rules and work through each one: Does every rule still match how you actually ship today? Do the conditions still hold? Are there conflicting rules? Are there rules referencing carrier services you no longer use?
Some of the most common issues include rules that reference package presets you’ve renamed, order tags you’ve stopped using, or carrier services that are no longer active on your account. You can't afford to misroute an order due to a rule you created months ago that no longer operates as assumed.
3. Confirm package presets and dimensions
If you’ve added products, changed packaging, or switched suppliers since last year, your package presets may not match what’s actually going out the door. Dimensional weight pricing means a misconfigured preset inflates every carrier rate you’re comparing.
Update presets to reflect your current product weights and packaging. If you use a platform that learns from past shipments, spot-check that the learned values still reflect what you’re shipping now, not what you shipped last year.
4. Set up (or review) rate shopping
Rate shopping is one of the highest-ROI items on any holiday season shipping checklist. Carrier surcharges spike in November and December, and the optimal carrier mix shifts. Automated rate comparison on every order protects you from locking into the wrong service at the wrong price when surcharges are at their peak.
If you’re not using automated rate comparison yet, this is the time to set it up. If you are, review your criteria: What does “best rate” mean specifically for holiday orders? Is it based on cost? Delivery speed? Reliability? Make sure your logic reflects what your customers expect—and what you’ve promised them in your holiday shipping policy.
5. Test your printer and scale hardware
Label printers and shipping scales are easy to take for granted until they’re the reason a line stops moving. Test every device in your fulfillment workflow now, while you have time to source replacements or escalate a support ticket without pressure.
For printers, run a full label print at production speed and confirm nothing jams, skips, or goes out of alignment under load. For scales, calibrate against a known reference weight. When it comes to your network, make sure every workstation that needs to print a label can do so without a frantic IT call on the busiest morning of the year.
If you’re expanding your stations for peak volume, add them and test them now. A new setup that “should just work” has a way of not working at the worst possible moment.
6. Stage your return policy
Your returns policy probably exists. But does it reflect your holiday season terms?
Many sellers extend return windows for holiday purchases. Some adjust their returns process between Dec. 26 and mid-January. If your policy language, your shipping platform’s return label settings, and your customer service team’s understanding aren’t all in sync, customers will find the gap.
Update your policy messaging, and configure your platform to generate return labels under the right conditions. Brief your customer-service team so they’re answering return questions from the actual policy, not a remembered version of it. A clear, easy-to-find returns process is one of the most underrated drivers of conversion for new holiday customers.
Run the list now, not later
Peak season preparation isn't complicated. Checking each shipping item takes less than an hour. It's worth the time investment. Overlooking even one of these issues means you're one surge away from a preventable crisis at the worst possible time.
Do this work now. When peak season hits, your only problem should be keeping up with the orders.
This story was produced by ShipStation and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.