Shipment & Delivery Weather

Wine, Beer and other Fine Beverages

Shippers of wine, beer and other beverages have a reputation that relies on delivering high-quality products to every customer in every shipment. Even smaller vendors thrive by delighting customers across the country and around the world. Our weather solutions for shipping ensure that your sensitive beverages are delivered within the ideal temperature range no matter where your customers reside.

Shipping temperatures as low as 70 degrees can begin to spoil your beverage and change the product that your reputation relies upon. You can’t risk delivering a beer that has oxidized or a wine that has a lifeless or acidic taste to it. These types of mistakes and lack of quality control can destroy a brand and ultimately a business.

To combat this, wine and beer makers and distributors need to add a level of intelligence to their shipping. While you can manually look up the weather forecast for one or two locations, your time is too valuable to manually review the weather for every shipment every day. Our shipping weather solution enable beverage makers and distributors to quickly look up thousands of forecasts for every shipment destination and date. In a few minutes, shippers can view which of their deliveries are at-risk from heat or cold.

Delicate Chocolates, Candies and Confections

Fine Chocolates and Candies base their business on the quality of their products. Freshness, quality ingredients, lack of preservatives and delicate taste and presentation. All of these great attributes are also the same reasons why shipping of these treats are a challenge for businesses. Ingredients of chocolate, marshmallow and gummy jellies can begin to melt above 75 degrees. Some candies may crack or take on a greasy texture after exposure to heat or extreme cold. Humidity, precipitation and other weather factors can also play a role in your delivery.

Melted, messy candies or those that have an altered taste can greatly affect businesses who don’t take the care to manage shipping temperatures. High return costs, high shipping costs and loss of reputation and business are just a few costly results for ignoring mother nature. The most common solution to these problems is often to choose a faster and more expensive shipment method. Faster shipping may reduce risk and time exposure but does not guarantee a high-quality delivery. Cold-packing and overnight shipping helps but often the cost to ship with ice can cost as much as the value of the product being shipped.

The Visual Crossing Shipping solution shows all of your delivery times and locations in a single view and can be viewed for any weather variable such as high and low temperatures, humidity, precipitation and much more. Using this information to pick a safe delivery window and accurately choose shipping methods will greatly enhance any candy business. Customers will greatly appreciate your attention to the quality of their order by alerting them to the conditions that make their delivery successful. Now, even the smallest of candy makers can provide the same high quality deliveries without taking on a significant cost.

Prescription Drugs

The potency of pharmaceuticals is often sensitive to extremes of heat and cold as well as humidity. While certain medicines must be shipped with a cold chain protocol, many others are shipped by more traditional means yet their shipment requires planning to avoid extremes. One of the most risky portions of the direct-to-consumer medicine delivery chain is the final day when the product may be sitting in a delivery truck or on a customer’s porch in the cold or heat.

Our shipping and mailing weather solution allows you to see the forecast ahead for your delivery destinations and make the required adjustments to ensure that patients receive their packages in acceptable temperature conditions.

Flowers, Plants and Live Shipments

Extreme weather conditions are a shipping limitation for nearly all live product delivery businesses. For items such as live plants, cut flowers, and live animals, the shipping times and delivery conditions must be managed carefully so as to not damage the product or kill the living creature being shipped. Whether you are shipping worms to gardeners or helping a pet bird reach a new home, knowing an accurate weather forecast for the delivery location and date is critical. There is no more certain way to receive a customer complaint and a bad review then to deliver dead plants or animals to an expectant customer.

With hundreds of millions of flowers shipped annually, delighting customers with fresh, vibrant blossoms year-round is a mainstay of the floral industry. One crucial difference between a delighted recipient and a droopy bouquet is the "last mile" of the shipping chain. Recommended temperatures vary based on the type of flowers, but extremes of either hot or cold create high risk and customer complaints. Also, shipping via a service that can minimize latency at the depots in the chain can be a helpful part of the solution. Knowing the legal rules required for the destination state or country are also critical and vary widely. Finally, make sure to carefully pack and label your plants to ensure proper handling and protection from the elements throughout their travels.

Also remember that live plants and animals typically require additional shipping forms and certifications especially if they are being shipped across borders. If you want to ensure that your living items arrive on the designated date with appropriate weather, you must take care to ensure that your package doesn’t get held up due to paperwork delays or unexpected fees. So make sure that you check your shipper’s policy and legal requirements carefully.