By early November, most shippers have locked in their peak carrier plan. New carriers take weeks to onboard, and few teams want to change anything once holiday volume starts moving.

That makes peak a good time to watch closely. The next eight weeks will show how your carriers perform under the most pressure they'll see all year. If you record what happens, you walk into January with evidence instead of impressions.

The timing matters more this year. UPS's 2027 rate increase takes effect December 21, with an average 5.9% increase plus changes to area surcharge ZIP codes, zone assignments and Additional Handling rules, according to Supply Chain Dive. FedEx's 5.9% increase follows on January 4. Your Q1 carrier conversations will happen right after those changes reach your invoices.

Reliability is now the buying criterion

Carrier selection has long been driven by rate, but buyers are weighing performance more heavily. AlixPartners' 2026 Home Delivery Survey, reported by FreightWaves, found that reliability has overtaken cost as the top reason executives choose a primary last-mile carrier. The same research found 88% of shoppers say a late delivery followed by only an apology weakens or ends their willingness to buy again.

Tusk's own research points the same way. In the 2026 Alternative Carrier Benchmark Report, 56% of shipping professionals said proven reliability data would make them more likely to adopt alternative carriers. Peak is when you can collect that proof from your own network.

Log late parcels by lane and by hub

Start with on-time performance, broken out by the origin and destination regions you ship most. A carrier-wide average will hide the trouble spots. Performance can vary a lot from one hub to the next, so tag late parcels with the facility they moved through whenever your tracking data allows it.

Write down the dates too. A carrier that slips for two days after Cyber Monday and recovers is a different story from one that stays behind through mid-December.

Track what happens after a parcel goes late

On-time rate tells you how often things go wrong. It doesn't tell you how a carrier responds. Note how quickly late parcels get delivered, whether tracking updates kept moving or went quiet, and how many "where is my order" tickets each carrier generated for your support team.

Keep a clean record of claims and exceptions

Lost and damaged parcels are easy to treat as one-off headaches during peak. Log every one with the carrier, the lane, the date filed and the date resolved. Claims frequency and resolution time carry real weight in a rate conversation, and they're hard to reconstruct from memory in January.

Reconcile every invoice line

Peak invoices are where surcharges stack up. Check demand surcharges, delivery area fees and Additional Handling charges against what you expected to pay, and note which charges grew faster than your volume. UPS also changed its fuel surcharge tables on November 2, so comparing fuel charges week over week will show how much of your cost increase came from pricing changes and how much came from your shipping mix.

Turn the file into a Q1 plan

By the first week of January, you should have a clear picture of which carriers held up, which lanes struggled and where your costs grew. That record supports two conversations.

The first is with your current carriers. Late-delivery and claims data by lane gives you more to negotiate with than a general request for a better rate. The second is with alternative carriers in the lanes where your incumbents fell short. Shippers who line up those carriers during Q4 can go live right after peak and test them on real volume well before next year's busy season. Our guide to running an alternative carrier pilot covers how to structure that test, and our post on setting up your 2027 carrier mix covers the diligence to do now.

Where Tusk fits

Most of this tracking is manual when every carrier has its own portal, invoice and data format. Tusk is the shipping infrastructure that connects e-commerce shippers to alternative carriers across all U.S. ZIP codes through a single integration, with unified invoicing and hub-level performance insights. With performance data by hub and every carrier's charges on one invoice, your peak record is easier to build and easier to act on when it's time to add carriers.

Planning your 2027 carrier mix? Talk to Tusk.