More than a third of all orders were made ready for dispatch on a Monday
Spreading delivery days brings Monday processing down from 38 to 28 percent
Amsterdam - Friday 14 augustus - written by Jeroen Gehlen.
Dutch warehouses made more than a third (38 percent) of all orders ready for dispatch on Monday in 2025. That is a sharp peak compared to 17 percent on Tuesday, 16 percent on Wednesday and 15 percent on both Thursday and Friday. This emerges from the latest Parcel Radar analysis by logistics SaaS platform Wuunder, based on 26 million orders across hundreds of online stores. Everything ordered from Friday afternoon onwards sits until Monday, because most warehouses are closed over the weekend. Under the promise of ‘order today, delivered the next working day’, that entire backlog has to be processed in a single day.
Meer weten? Plan een video-call met een van onze experts.
Differences between sectors
In all fourteen sectors analysed, Monday was by far the busiest order processing day, although the differences are considerable. In DIY and home improvement, 45.2 percent of the week’s volume is packed on Monday, followed by sports and outdoor (43.5 percent) and baby products (41.5 percent). Electronics (41.0 percent), books (40.6 percent) and fashion (40.3 percent) also process more than four in ten orders on the first working day.
Groceries are the exception at 25.4 percent. There the work stays more evenly spread across the week, with Tuesday (21.7 percent) and Thursday (19.2 percent) as solid second and third days. Gift items (34.1 percent) and luxury goods (35.9 percent) also see a quieter start to the week.
Shifting a quarter flattens the whole week
Better spreading of deliveries across the week can significantly reduce the Monday peak. When consumers more often choose a delivery day later in the week, warehouses get more room to process orders in a spread-out way rather than all at once on Monday. The analysis models what that would achieve: if a quarter of Monday’s volume is distributed across the rest of the week, Monday’s share drops from 38 to 28 percent. Tuesday comes out at 19 percent, Wednesday at 18 percent and Thursday and Friday both at 17 percent. The result is a flatter and more predictable weekly pattern.
It is precisely the sectors with the heaviest Monday that gain the most when consumers are given a choice of delivery day. In DIY and home improvement, Monday’s share falls by 11.3 percentage points to 33.9 percent, and in sports and outdoor by 10.8 percentage points to 32.7 percent.
Jeroen Gehlen, founder of Wuunder: “The Monday peak doesn’t originate in the warehouse, but in the checkout. Next-working-day delivery has been the standard for years, a choice the whole sector made together. Warehouses are usually closed at the weekend, so everything ordered from Friday afternoon onwards piles up until Monday. The warehouse runs at full capacity that day, which means the carrier does the same on Tuesday. To handle those two days, the chain leans heavily on small subcontractors with razor-thin margins and a large flexible workforce. The option to choose your own delivery day means a flatter week and less dependence on a flexible layer that only exists to absorb a single peak day. The technology for this has existed for years, and research showed that 88 percent of consumers would like to decide for themselves when their parcel arrives. What matters now is that the sector takes that step together.”