Peak season stress-tests every gap in an international shipping program.

Carrier capacity tightens. Customs processing slows. Delivery windows stretch. Brands that discover a structural problem in November don't have the time or the leverage to fix it before the damage is done.

These issues matter even more this year, because cross-border logistics is consolidating. On July 1, 2026, for instance, Global-e completed its acquisition of Passport, folding a cross-border carrier network into a platform with its own pricing interests and its own reasons for how volume gets routed. The market your carrier operates in is changing around your program, whether or not the name on your invoice has changed. The questions worth asking have changed with it.

The eight questions below, which every brand should put to their international carrier before peak season begins, don't merely evaluate how well your carrier executes today. They surface something harder to see: whether your carrier's operating model is heading toward more resilience or toward more dependency on a single ecosystem.

The time to ask difficult questions is now, when you still have time to act on the answers. These eight questions are where to start. A carrier worth trusting can answer all of them directly and specifically. If the answers are vague, slow to arrive, or missing entirely, that's useful information too.

1: What is your documented SLA recovery plan if a major carrier or postal service fails during peak?

This isn't hypothetical. Canada Post went on strike for 32 days in November and December 2024. The UK's Royal Mail spent over a year in a pay dispute with postal workers that stretched from 2022 into mid-2023, with repeated strike action during the run-up to two consecutive holiday seasons. Postal disruptions during peak season are recurring rather than rare.

The real question isn't whether your carrier has experienced disruption. It's whether they have a specific, operational plan for what happens when it hits. "We have carrier relationships we can activate" is not a plan. A plan names which alternative carriers are active and tested on which markets, states what the rerouting SLA is, and spells out how you're notified and who makes the call to reroute.

Nearly every international shipping audit we've performed uncovered at least one assumption the client believed was true but wasn't documented anywhere.

What a strong answer looks like: "We maintain active relationships with across . Our rerouting protocol activates within . Here is how we notify clients, and here is the SLA commitment we hold during the disruption."

2: How many final-mile carriers do you actively operate across, and how quickly can you reroute a shipment to an alternative?

There's a real difference between a carrier that has relationships with multiple networks and one that actively routes across them.

A network running across more than 100 final-mile carriers in over 220 countries can move a shipment when one carrier fails, without manual intervention, escalation, or a renegotiated agreement. A carrier with two or three preferred partners can tell you they have options. But when you need that option activated in 48 hours, the difference in resilience stops being theoretical.

Ask specifically how many carriers are active today, meaning they have shipments moving through them on a regular basis, rather than how many relationships technically exist. Then ask about the rerouting timeline from disruption identified to alternative carrier live.

One important caveat: A network with 100 active carriers isn't automatically stronger than one with 35. The size of the network matters, but so do the quality of those integrations, customs expertise in each market, the maturity of the APIs connecting those carriers, and whether failover routing has been tested under real operating conditions. A smaller network that's actively managed and regularly exercised can outperform a much larger network that's little more than a collection of inactive relationships.

What a strong answer looks like: Specific numbers on active carriers by region, with a documented rerouting window. If they can't tell you how many carriers are actively routing right now, the network isn't as deep as the marketing suggests.

3: What is your DDP (Delivered Duty Paid) on-time performance rate across your active markets, and how is it measured?

On-time performance is the metric every carrier leads with. How that metric is measured matters.

Some carriers start the clock at the first carrier scan. Some measure against their own internal SLA, which may not match the delivery window your customer saw at checkout. Some quietly exclude certain countries, service levels, or disruption periods from the number they show you.

Ask for on-time performance in DDP terms: delivered, in the customer's hands, within the window they were shown at purchase, with duties and taxes already accounted for rather than billed on arrival. That's the number tied to repeat purchase behavior. Anything else is measuring the carrier's operations, not your customer's experience.

What a strong answer looks like: A specific rate, tied to the measurement definition you asked for, not the carrier's preferred one. If they give you a number but skip the methodology question, that's the tell.

4: How do you communicate with us during a disruption, and what is your response time commitment?

Communication during a disruption is often the difference between a manageable situation and a brand crisis.

The brands that successfully made it through recent peak seasons weren't necessarily the ones whose carriers performed better operationally. They were the ones whose carriers communicated faster. Finding out about a disruption 24 hours before it hits your shipments is a different experience than finding out when customers start emailing.

Ask for specifics. Who notifies you, through what channel, and how fast after the disruption is identified? Is there a dedicated account contact reachable outside business hours during peak, or does an off-hours issue wait until Monday? What's the actual response window on a Saturday in November when your Canada market stops moving?

What a strong answer looks like: A named contact, not a shared inbox. If the answer defaults to a general support line or an unnamed team member, that gap is what turns a shipment delay into a brand crisis.

5: How do you handle customs and duties visibility, and do my customers see the true total landed cost at checkout?

Surprise duties at delivery are one of the leading drivers of international customer churn. A customer who paid one amount at checkout and then opened the door to an unexpected customs bill had a materially worse experience than your delivery data will ever show.

Ask your carrier exactly what DDP coverage means in practice. Does it include all duties and taxes for every destination market? How is the duty calculation kept current as regulations change? What happens if the calculation is wrong and the customer gets billed the shortfall at the door?

If you're shipping DDU (Delivered Duty Unpaid, meaning the customer pays duties on arrival rather than at checkout), ask which of your top destination markets carry the highest duty rates and whether customers are clearly warned of potential charges before they complete the order.

What a strong answer looks like: A clear methodology, specific coverage by market, a process for handling calculation errors, and a recommendation on DDU vs. DDP by destination based on your shipment profile.

6: What data do you provide that connects delivery experience to customer retention?

Most carrier reporting tells you what happened to the shipment. Almost none of it tells you what happened to the customer.

This is the gap shadow loss lives in. A carrier who can tell you 97% of shipments hit SLA but can't tell you anything about the customer's actual delivery experience is leaving you blind on one of the strongest predictors of international lifetime value.

We hear about this gap more than any other when brands start posing harder questions about international retention. Ask what reporting exists beyond shipment-level SLA data: delivery experience surveys, tracking engagement, duty surprise rates by market, how accurate the customer-facing delivery window actually is. Although a few carriers are starting to offer this data, most aren't there yet. And a carrier thinking about the customer's experience is a different kind of partner than one optimizing purely for operational SLA.

What a strong answer looks like: Most carriers will have SLA data and nothing past it. That gap is itself the answer, and it's worth writing down now so you can track whether it closes during the next year.

7: What happened to your clients' international shipments during the Canada Post strike in November and December 2024?

This is the proof-of-concept question.

The Canada Post strike was a real disruption. It lasted 32 days and affected one of the largest international markets for U.S. DTC brands. Every carrier operating in Canada had to respond to it one way or another.

Ask specifically what happened to client shipments during the strike: how fast alternative routing activated, what the SLA impact was, how clients were notified, whether anything got lost or significantly delayed. This isn't a trick question. It's an operational record check. A carrier with a real multi-carrier backup plan will have a clear answer and a track record they're willing to share. A carrier that struggled will either not remember clearly or reach for vague language about doing their best under difficult circumstances.

The Canada Post strike won't be the last major disruption. How your carrier handled the last one is a reasonable predictor of how they'll handle the next.

What a strong answer looks like: Specific numbers regarding shipments affected, rerouting timeline, SLA impact (ideally zero), how and when clients were notified, and whether the disruption was operationally transparent or buried in aggregate reporting.

8: Who owns your carrier, and how might that affect what happens to your shipments during a disruption?

Everything above tests competence: Can your carrier reroute, communicate, perform? This question tests something different. It tests neutrality.

A carrier can be operationally excellent and still route toward its parent platform's interests when capacity gets tight. When a carrier gets acquired or absorbed into a larger commercial ecosystem, its routing decisions and escalation paths can start answering to that platform's priorities instead of yours. Passport spent years building an independent cross-border network before Global-e folded it into its platform earlier this month, and that shift is the clearest current example of what this question is really asking. For the fuller picture of how acquisitions, platform-owned logistics, and carrier vertical integration are reshaping the market, we've mapped the pattern in detail here. Consolidation doesn't automatically mean worse service. It does mean the decisions inside that network now serve a different set of priorities than they did before the deal closed.

Ask your carrier directly: Who owns you? Has that changed, or have you been folded into a platform or commercial ecosystem, in the past three years? If so, how does that shape routing decisions, carrier selection, and backup plan activation when capacity is constrained?

You don't need to distrust an acquired carrier by default. You do need to understand the ownership structure and what it means for your optionality before a disruption puts it to the test.

What a strong answer looks like: A direct answer, not a deflection. If the response is vague about ownership or defensive about affiliations, treat that as the data point.

What to do with the answers

The purpose of asking these questions isn't to catch your carrier failing. It's to understand where your international program has structural gaps before peak season (or the next round of consolidation) makes them expensive.

If your carrier answers all eight questions specifically, with data and documentation, you have a clear picture of your exposure and your coverage. If the answers are vague, slow, or missing, you need to have a follow-up conversation before November.

The Cross-Border Optionality Check maps your current international program against the eight risk dimensions most likely to produce silent customer churn: carrier dependency, routing flexibility, DDP reliability, escalation paths, integration exposure, customer experience visibility, repeat purchase risk, and disruption readiness. It takes 3 minutes and gives you a scored, documented starting point for the conversation with your carrier, your 3PL, and your leadership team.

Question 8 above is worth sitting with longer than the rest. Competence questions have straightforward right answers. The neutrality question doesn't. At ePost Global, we're not a platform with a broader commercial stack to protect, and we're not integrating our way into your logistics program for reasons that have nothing to do with parcel delivery. We're an independent multi-carrier network built to hold when normal plans break, whether the cause is a strike, a storm, or a shift in who owns the carrier you're using right now.