According to NOAA’s May 2026 seasonal outlook, forecasters are predicting a below-normal Atlantic hurricane season—with eight to 14 named storms, three to six hurricanes, and one to three major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher). Forecasters expect a developing El Niño pattern to suppress tropical activity this year. But as forecasters are quick to note, a below-normal season doesn’t mean a low-risk one. It only takes one storm making landfall to make a season impactful.

Here’s how GlobalPost approaches hurricane season—from preparation through recovery.

How far in advance do you begin preparing for hurricane season, and what does that preparation look like operationally?

GlobalPost starts planning well before hurricane season, reviewing routes, updating contingency plans, and coordinating with suppliers and facilities. Their flexible network and supplier relationships allow them to adjust routes proactively to keep packages moving and minimize delays.

When a hurricane hits a region, how do you communicate service disruptions and estimated recovery timelines to shippers and their customers?

GlobalPost maintains a dedicated GlobalPost Service Updates page that serves as a comprehensive hub—not just for hurricane-related alerts, but for global shipping updates including international customs delays, regional weather events, and geopolitical disruptions worldwide. In addition to this public resource, GlobalPost provides proactive email notifications and real-time tracking milestones to keep merchants and customers aligned.

What options do merchants have for rerouting or holding packages when a storm is approaching a delivery area?

Because GlobalPost sits at the intersection of various transit points, they can often divert high volumes to alternate processing centers outside a storm’s path. Their supplier network and flexible routing options help keep packages moving safely and minimize interruptions.

How do you handle packages that are already in transit when a hurricane makes landfall?

Packages in affected facilities are secured until it’s safe to resume processing. Where possible, GlobalPost uses its network to reroute shipments around the disruption to reduce delays and keep deliveries on track.

What’s the claims process for packages lost or damaged due to hurricane-related disruptions?

Merchants can file a claim through the GlobalPost website. Their team works to investigate and resolve claims quickly, providing transparency throughout the process.

What steps do you recommend merchants take before hurricane season to minimize shipping disruptions?

GlobalPost recommends using the Service Updates page as your hub for global shipping trends and regional alerts. They also advise against relying on a single service or gateway for high-volume shipments to hurricane-prone areas, leveraging services with added insurance, building in additional transit time during peak storm periods, verifying address accuracy, and preparing standardized customer communications so you can quickly set expectations.

How quickly are you typically able to resume full operations in affected areas after a major storm?

Recovery depends on the severity of the storm, but GlobalPost’s teams and suppliers work around the clock to resume operations safely. As conditions improve, they restore service by monitoring local infrastructure, supplier availability, and transportation networks in real time.

Have you made any recent investments specifically to improve your hurricane response?

Yes. GlobalPost has enhanced its tracking systems, strengthened contingency protocols, and invested in partnerships with suppliers to better support shippers during hurricane season. This includes linking to destination final-mile carrier tracking numbers for most shipments to enable more complete visibility. They’re also working toward offering predictive delivery insights, with ongoing enhancements focused on speed, transparency, and resilience during disruptions.

Be ready before the first storm forms

Hurricane season doesn’t wait for you to be ready—but you can be. Bookmark the GlobalPost Service Updates page before the first storm forms, add coverage for high-value shipments, and build buffer time into your delivery estimates for coastal destinations.Questions about your shipments? Contact GlobalPost support or visit our Service Updates page for real-time alerts throughout the season.

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For Brian Dunagan, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at GlobalPost, the shift isn’t really about policy. It’s about trust. At the Manifest supply chain conference this year, Dunagan sat down with the Outside the Box with Asendia USA podcast to unpack what 2025 taught the industry—and what the winners in 2026 will do differently.

His argument was simple: international shipping isn’t a logistics problem anymore. It’s a product design problem.

The real issue isn’t duties—it’s surprises

Tariffs have existed for as long as global trade has. What changed in 2025 was their visibility. Consumers began receiving unexpected invoices after their packages arrived, and the friction moved from the back end to the customer’s living room. The emotional response was swift.

“About 48% of consumers abandon the cart when they don’t feel like the price is transparent.”
—Amanda Meadows, Director of Partnerships, Asendia USA

Cart abandonment at that scale reframes the problem. Customers aren’t walking away because shipping costs too much. They’re walking away because they don’t know what shipping will cost. A duty paid at checkout feels like part of the deal. A duty charged at the door feels like a mistake—and unpredictability erodes trust faster than any price point ever could.

Customer experience now starts at the label

There’s a common assumption that customer experience lives at checkout, or maybe at the doorstep. Dunagan disagreed. For international orders, he argued, the most consequential customer moment happens earlier—at label creation.

This is where compliance rules, duties and taxes, and delivery expectations collide. Errors or ambiguity at this step don’t just cause operational delays. They create broken promises. A shipment mislabeled or a duty miscalculated becomes a customer service ticket, a negative review, or a lost lifetime customer.

The implication: shipping teams are designing the customer experience whether they realize it or not. Every decision about carriers, duty handling, and documentation shapes what arrives—and how the recipient feels when it does.

Absorb complexity for the customer, don’t pass it along

Modern international shipping can be extraordinarily complex. Customs documentation, country-specific regulations, duty calculations, and tax thresholds vary by destination and shift constantly. The question isn’t whether complexity exists. The question is who bears it.

GlobalPost’s approach is to take it on. Through Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) options and the newly launched GlobalPost Plus – Duties & Taxes Included, where duties and taxes are calculated and shown at label creation—not billed after the fact. Streamlined customs forms–no more printing paperwork.Compliance decisions happen upstream, inside a team built for them. With coverage across 25+countries and parcel protection up to $200, the infrastructure is there; the real unlock is the experience it enables.

“If you don’t have the right shipping process as part of that, you’re going to have customers not purchase it.”
—Brian Dunagan, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships, GlobalPost

That’s the throughline Dunagan returned to: a strong product, a clean UX, and a frictionless checkout will still lose customers if shipping introduces surprise. Shipping has to be factored into product design, not bolted on at the end.

What 2026 will reward

The brands that scale internationally in 2026 won’t necessarily be the fastest or the cheapest. They’ll be the clearest. Predictability will beat optimization. Transparency will beat speed. And intentional design will beat patchwork workarounds.

That’s true for merchants of every size. A small shop selling to 10 countries needs the same clarity at the label as an enterprise brand shipping to 100. The merchants still treating international as an experiment—piecing together carriers and hoping for the best—will find the friction catching up to them.

“How do we demystify international, make it easy for people?”
—Brian Dunagan, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships, GlobalPost

That question drives GlobalPost’s product roadmap. It’s also the question every brand selling cross-border should be asking itself.

A better mental model for international shipping

The biggest reframe from Dunagan’s conversation is also the simplest. International shipping isn’t an operational line item. It’s part of the product experience. Every surprise it creates is a surprise the brand created. Every moment of clarity it delivers is a moment the brand earned.

Complexity isn’t going away. The winning brands in 2026 will be the ones who absorb it on behalf of their customers—and make the global feel as simple as the local.

Stop losing carts to surprise fees. Learn how GlobalPost Plus – Duties & Taxes Included shows duties and taxes at label creation on ShipStation and ShipStation API—so your customers never get a bill at the door.

The post International Shipping Changed, Expectations Didn’t appeared first on GlobalPost.

When was the last time a customer touched your brand? Really touched it—held it, opened it, felt it? The answer, for most ecommerce businesses, is the delivery. Just the delivery.

And yet most retail operations still treat delivery like a back-office function—something to hand off, minimize, and hope for the best. At The Delivery Conference 2026, a room full of retail and logistics leaders made a compelling case that this mindset is quietly killing retention. The international ecommerce delivery experience, they argued, isn’t a cost center. It’s the point.

This article shares insights from expert-backed sessions on ecommerce delivery, AI, sustainability, logistics, and more at The Delivery Conference 2026. Watch all of the event sessions on-demand.

The leaky bucket problem

Chris Forbes, co-founder of Cheeky Panda, put it plainly in the Delivery That Delivers session.

“You’ve really got to focus on not having a leaky bucket,” Forbes said. “If you’re working really hard to get your customers, you’ve got to have retention—and retention is about delivery and customer experience.”

That metaphor is worth sitting with. Retailers collectively spend enormous sums on acquisition: paid social, SEO, influencer partnerships, promotions. But every poor delivery experience—a late package, a silent carrier, a frustrating return—punches a hole in the bottom of the bucket. You pour more in; it keeps leaking out.

Kristian Tottmar, strategic network lead at H&M, made a similar point about organizational design. Delivery doesn’t fail because of bad carriers. It fails because it gets siloed.

“Deliver fulfillment—it is not only a logistic question,” Totmer said. “It needs to be anchored, strongly, to your brand and company strategy.”

What he’s describing is a company-wide posture shift. Not a logistics upgrade. Not a carrier swap. A fundamental change in how delivery gets treated inside the org—who owns it, who it reports to, what it’s measured against.

It’s not about speed. It’s about trust.

Here’s the finding that surprised people in the room most: customers don’t actually need their packages faster. They need to believe the package is going to show up.

Krieger was direct about it. 

“People are really all about trust and certainty,” he said. “They don’t necessarily mind if things aren’t as optimal as they could be—as long as they trust what you’re telling them is actually going to happen and that the path is still acceptable.”

Alan Mullen, senior customer service manager at Superdry, had the living proof. During the Smart Costing session, he described a peak period when thousands of Superdry orders were stuck at customs. His team braced for an inbox crisis. What they found instead: when customers were proactively updated with clear timelines, the flood of support contacts didn’t come. Customers who knew what was happening didn’t need to ask.

“Customers don’t expect things to be perfect, but they expect you to update them when things go wrong.” – Alan Mullen, Superdry (Smart Costing)

Jade Roberts, general manager of customer experience at Monica Vinader, had taken this principle further than almost anyone else on the stage. During the Make Delivery Your Advantage session, she described a system her team built: whenever a parcel was predicted to arrive late, an email went out before the customer had any idea there was a problem. The delivery charge was automatically refunded. The estimated arrival was updated. A personal concierge from customer care was assigned to see the order through.

“What we’re telling you at that point is your parcel’s going to be late,” Roberts said. “But we’re doing everything we can to make sure you don’t have to contact us.”

The result was higher NPS scores across every carrier they initially tested it with. Some customers wrote back to say thank you—for a delivery that was running behind.

That’s the counterintuitive heart of this: a late delivery, handled well, can strengthen the customer relationship more than a delivery that arrived on time and was never acknowledged. The post-purchase window isn’t dead space. It’s an opportunity.

The operational case: Getting out of your own way

There’s a reason retailers who understand all of this still struggle to execute it consistently. The operational overhead is real.

DDP service offerings built for the way you actually ship. GlobalPost’s DDP options—Go, Plus, and Plus – Duties & Taxes Included—give you control over how landed costs are handled before they arrive on the doorstep. Instead of leaving customers to face unexpected fees at delivery, you can price duties and taxes at checkout and ship with confidence that what your customer paid is what they owe. That kind of transparency doesn’t just protect the customer experience—it removes a whole category of post-delivery friction from your support queue.

Hassle-free international shipping, from label to doorstep. Customs documentation is one of the quieter drains on fulfillment time—not dramatic enough to escalate, persistent enough to compound. GlobalPost reduces that burden by helping customers complete customs details accurately, without requiring your team to start from scratch on every cross-border shipment. Add address verification and concierge support into the mix, and what used to be a source of “where’s my order?” tickets becomes a more predictable, lower-touch process.

The goal of all of it is the same: more bandwidth for the work that actually requires a human. That’s what makes the strategic international ecommerce delivery experience possible in the first place—getting the operational layer out of the way.

What comes next

Mullen offered a parting thought during Smart Costing that was hard to shake.

“Within the next couple of years, people are going to have their own bots,” he said. “We’re gonna have bots talking to our own AI—and the customer world is going to change as well.”

He’s describing a near future in which the international ecommerce delivery experience is negotiated between systems—where a customer’s AI agent checks your shipping options, reviews your return policy, compares them to a competitor’s, and makes a recommendation before the customer has typed a single thing. The brands positioned to win in that environment are the ones who have already built delivery into their strategy, not as a cost to be managed but as a differentiator to be designed.

The merchants at TDC 2026 aren’t waiting. The leaky bucket is real, the evidence is overwhelming, and the tools to fix it exist. The question is just whether you’re going to treat your next shipment like a transaction—or like a relationship.

How do you know if you’re getting it right?

A quick gut check. You’re in good shape if…

Delivery is a company-wide conversation. Your ops, marketing, and customer experience teams are aligned on what a good delivery experience looks like—and what it costs when it goes wrong.

You’re using DDP to take the surprise out of international orders. When duties and taxes are calculated and communicated upfront, your customers aren’t hit with unexpected fees at the door—and your team isn’t fielding the fallout.

You’re proactive, not reactive. When something goes wrong, your customer knows before they have to ask. You’re not waiting for the “where’s my order?” email.

Your post-purchase window feels like your brand. The tracking page, the notification emails, the returns flow—they look and feel like you, not a carrier.

Your team isn’t doing things a system could do. Carrier service decisions, customs documentation, label details—if these are still manual, that’s time and money that could go elsewhere.

You’re measuring what matters. You’re not just tracking on-time delivery rate. You’re looking at NPS, repeat purchase rate, and post-delivery contact volume—the signals that tell you how the relationship is holding up.

If most of those are yes, you’re ahead of the curve. If a few gave you pause, that’s where the opportunity is.

Every shipment is a chance to build the relationship. GlobalPost gives you the tools to make it count. Talk to our team to get started.

The post Delivery as a Competitive Advantage (Not a Cost Center) appeared first on GlobalPost.