The Festive Delivery Squeeze 

Festive shopping has always involved some last-minute panic. A forgotten gift, an extra box of sweets or a beauty order placed days before Diwali can still be rescued by ecommerce, but only if the parcel arrives before the occasion.

In 2026, considerably more infrastructure is competing to make that happen. On January 13, India Post booked its first ONDC order as a logistics service provider, allowing sellers to request pickups and use its postal network for deliveries. ONDC now has 70+ logistics providers and 50,000 riders serving more than 150 cities.

Then, on July 28, Flipkart widened access to Ekart’s logistics network for D2C brands and other external businesses. Ekart launched the expansion with more than 300 franchise outlets, which it plans to increase to 1,000 by the end of 2026, supported by over 1 Mn sq ft of dedicated warehousing.

These additions are entering an ecosystem that already includes established express-delivery companies such as Blue Dart and FedEx, national 3PL networks such as Delhivery, Shadowfax and Xpressbees, and ecommerce logistics aggregators such as Shiprocket. Over the past decade, D2C brands have gained access to more carriers, fulfilment centres and last-mile services without having to build their own networks.

The infrastructure is being supplemented by seasonal labour. TeamLease expects temporary hiring across retail, ecommerce, quick commerce and logistics to rise 15%-20% during the 2026 festive season. Separately, Adecco India estimates a 10%-15% demand-supply gap in peak frontline roles.

Yet infrastructure and workers address only one part of the festive delivery chain. Our examination of dark-store preparation looked at how inventory is positioned and replenished, while our festive ecommerce edition explored how inventory, payments, fulfilment and returns must work together. 

This story follows the order into the last mile, where those earlier preparations either result in an on-time delivery or begin to unravel.

Capacity Is Not Control

On paper, D2C brands are entering the festive season with more delivery partners, riders and fulfilment capacity. The complication is that they do not control where that capacity is available, and the delivery promise itself has become harder to keep.

Discounts once bought brands some patience. A shopper getting a good deal might have accepted a five- or seven-day wait. Quick commerce has altered that equation. As Bombay Shaving Company cofounder and COO Deepak Gupta put it, customers now “want both deal and speed”.

The change was already visible during Diwali 2025. According to Unicommerce’s platform data, ecommerce order volumes increased 24%, but quick-commerce orders grew 120% and brand websites recorded 33% higher volumes. Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities contributed 55% of orders, even as delivery times improved 15%.

For D2C brands, these numbers create an unusual festive equation. They must generate demand through discounts, advertising and influencer campaigns while meeting delivery expectations increasingly shaped by platforms whose warehouses, inventory and last-mile networks they do not control.

The instinctive response is to add carriers, vehicles, pickups and temporary workers. Bombay Shaving Company, for instance, increases the number of delivery partners it works with by almost 50% during the festive period.

Shipsy cofounder and CEO Soham Chokshi pointed to inventory positioning as a decision that cannot be corrected cheaply once demand begins. 

RENÉE Cosmetics cofounder Ashutosh Valani identified demand concentrated in particular cities, postal codes and short festive windows as the bigger risk.

The blockage can occur at several points. Gupta explained that vehicles unable to secure unloading appointments at a marketplace facility can eventually choke a carrier’s distribution centre. The brand has to consequently arrange multiple daily pickups during the festive period so that D2C orders do not accumulate until the evening.

Additional riders can produce a similar mismatch. As Alvarez & Marsal’s managing director Rishav Jain pointed out, a network may have enough workers across a city but too few in the outer catchments where delivery density is lower or demand has risen unexpectedly.

The defining logistics problem for D2C brands in 2026, therefore, may not be finding another delivery partner. It will be aligning inventory, warehouse throughput, pickup capacity and riders with demand at the precise place and time an order needs to move and absorbing the cost when that alignment breaks.

Before examining how D2C brands can manage this mismatch, here is how major logistics networks are adding capacity, widening access and opening their infrastructure to external businesses ahead of the 2026 festive peak.

Planning Moves From City Level To Catchments

Starting early is already part of the festive playbook. D2C brands typically begin preparing around June or July, working out expected demand, inventory requirements, campaign calendars and logistics capacity months before the sale period.

For instance, as Gupta told Inc42, Bombay Shaving Company starts this process around four months before festive sales. Its preparation includes replicating inventory across regional warehouses, adding backup logistics partners, securing turnaround-time commitments and tracking orders more closely once volumes begin rising.

In 2026, however, the timing alone will not be enough. Alongside the usual preparations, brands will have to plan inventory and manpower at a much more granular level.

Chokshi said these decisions should be frozen six to eight weeks before the festive season. Instead of relying on state-level sales or demand over the preceding 12 months, brands need to map individual SKUs to specific fulfilment nodes and postal code clusters. 

“Carrier capacity, warehouse space, even ad budgets can be bought late. Inventory position cannot. Once demand starts, moving stock between nodes costs more than the margin on the goods being moved,” Chokshi said.

For instance, in categories such as food and grocery, brands have to make an even narrower allocation. As Arvind Mediratta, founder and CEO of Elixiir Foods, which operates FreshTerra, said, the relevant planning unit in 2026 is the micro-catchment.

“In 2026, you cannot plan festive inventory with a broad national or regional forecast; you must decide which specific micro-catchments and retail store catchments get which tier of inventory weeks in advance,” Mediratta said.

This requires brands to monitor local consumption velocity, catchment demographics and basket composition. They must balance regular replenishment demand with larger festive packs and gifting products that may have a shorter selling window. 

The same principle applies beyond grocery. RENÉE Cosmetics plans across its website, marketplaces, quick commerce platforms and offline network by combining historical festive trends with product launches, campaign calendars, order velocity and geography.

Valani said historical performance cannot be treated as a fixed template because an unexpectedly successful product or creator campaign can quickly change the original demand allocation.

For the 2026 season, Chokshi recommended using demand from the previous two festive cycles, checking fill rates at each node and comparing promised delivery times with actual performance during peak volumes. This can reveal whether a warehouse holds the products likely to be ordered within its catchment.

Brands must run this exercise separately for their websites, marketplaces, quick commerce platforms and offline stores. The same SKU may require a different inventory position for each channel because their replenishment cycles and fulfilment processes differ.

The assessment must also begin before dispatch. Address quality, payment mode and historical RTO rates by postal code can identify orders likely to fail before they consume warehouse and last-mile capacity.

The shift in the 2026 festive season, therefore, is from estimating how much festive inventory a brand needs nationally to deciding which SKU should sit at which node, for which channel and near which 

Networks Must Work Harder

The 2025 festive peak showed how quickly shipment growth requires physical expansion. Delhivery handled 295 Mn express parcels in Q3 FY26, up 43% year-on-year, after its combined express-delivery and partner-centre network grew to 4,750 from around 4,500 in the previous year.  

Shadowfax entered FY27 with approximately 2.6 Lakh delivery partners and coverage across 15,656 postal codes. Its Delhi NCR sorting centre can process up to 10 Lakh orders a day at approximately 48,000 shipments an hour. 

Even at this scale, orders arriving near the final dispatch window can exceed the hourly capacity of loading bays, sortation lines or receiving facilities.

According to analysts Inc42 interacted with, adding temporary workers shortly before the peak does not immediately increase usable capacity because new workers still need to learn routes, dispatch processes and exception handling. 

The model losing relevance in 2026 is one primary carrier, a few large warehouses serving distant markets and seasonal hiring after demand has already begun rising.

The deployment of gig capacity is consequently becoming more localised. Jain said blanket city-wide incentives used during the 2025 peak season are giving way to catchment-level deployment in 2026, with temporary capacity added in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities before demand spikes rather than after them.

More of the incremental volume will also have to be absorbed through automation. Carrier allocation, address correction, rescheduling, order-status requests and first-level exception triage can be automated, allowing employees to focus on shipments that require judgement. 

Across the logistics networks handled by Shipsy, close to 94% of routine operational decisions are now resolved without human intervention.

The distinction is between identifying a delay and acting on it. If 200 shipments are at risk, the system must determine which should be rerouted, which customers need revised delivery windows and which cases require manual intervention, rather than leaving an operations team to work through the entire queue.

For D2C brands, the relevant capacity metrics in 2026 are hourly orders processed at each fulfilment node, pickup cut-off compliance, orders handled per dispatcher and the time required to shift volume to other partners when there is a slowdown. 

This is the nuance expected now. Earlier, they might have merely tracked the number of riders, vehicles or logistics partners available nationally.

Additional capacity also raises a question D2C brands cannot ignore. Amazon and Ekart operate logistics networks originally built to support their own marketplaces, and industry sources cited by Inc42 expect those internal operations to take priority during festive peaks. 

External brands may consequently have more delivery options in 2026 without knowing whether the same capacity will remain available when marketplace volumes surge.

Where Speed Stops Paying

Puneet Mansukhani, global retail head of digital and technology transformation at KPMG in India, described 2025 as a capacity game defined by additional riders and warehouses. In 2026, he expects the focus to shift to the productivity and delivery density generated by that capacity.

“The tipping point comes when incremental festive orders start requiring incremental kilometres and dedicated delivery capacity rather than fitting into existing routes,” Mansukhani said. This risk increases in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, where order growth may be distributed across a wider geography than in metropolitan cores.

Festive growth becomes unattractive when the cost of fulfilling the next order rises faster than its contribution, he added. Contracted shipping rates may remain unchanged, but priority movement, backup carriers, additional storage, repeated handovers and regional inventory can still raise the effective fulfilment cost.

Bombay Shaving Company’s Gupta further said higher sales and absolute margins can absorb some dilution. The calculation weakens, however, once additional orders require dedicated vehicles, separate routes or capacity that is not already available in the network.

Growing backlogs, longer processing times, falling delivery-success rates and location-specific delays indicate when this point is approaching. 

RENÉE Cosmetics tracks these warning signs so that inventory can be redistributed, capacity added in affected locations or campaign intensity reduced before more orders enter an overloaded node.

The decision affects more than the immediate shipping cost. Valani said: “There is no point maximising order volumes during a campaign if fulfilment cannot keep pace and the experience impacts repeat purchases,” 

With customer-acquisition costs increasing, retention and the post-purchase experience have become equally important for brands. 

The cost continues after an unsuccessful delivery. Occasion-led products returned while festive demand remains active may be resold, but those arriving later can become markdowns or write-downs. Chokshi termed this the “cost tail of speed”. 

Dark stores, denser delivery arrangements and temporary hiring can remain on the books after festive volumes normalise, while returns that are not processed and resold during the season can clog the network and become write-downs. 

The decision in the 2026 festive season is therefore not whether to promise speed everywhere, but where inventory proximity and delivery density make that promise profitable. More delivery partners can create alternatives when one route slows; they cannot correct inventory positioned in the wrong node, reopen a missed marketplace appointment or make scattered orders fit into a viable delivery route.

THE STARTUP SPOTLIGHT | HOW AURUM CRAFTS IS BRINGING INDIAN CRAFT INTO MODERN HOMES

• Aurum Crafts offers handcrafted wooden homeware and kitchenware, including serving trays, cheese platters, chopping boards and bowls, made by artisans in Jaipur and Bagru.
• The brand combines traditional woodworking and hand-painting techniques with contemporary designs, positioning handcrafted products as functional, everyday homeware rather than purely decorative handicrafts.
• Founded by Punit Agarwal and Chandni Gupta in 2022, the D2C brand sells through its website, with products spanning accessible homeware to premium gifting pieces; it reported monthly revenue of around ₹5 Lakh in early 2025.

DEEP DIVE

ECOMMERCE BUZZ

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