Cyber Monday Chaos: E-Comm Deductions That Stick

Cyber Monday has become the Super Bowl of online retail.

In 2024, U.S. shoppers spent $13.3 billion online on Cyber Monday, up 7.3% year over year—the biggest single online shopping day ever recorded. During the peak hours of 8:00–10:00 p.m. Eastern, consumers were spending about $15.8 million per minute.

Looking ahead, analysts expect U.S. online holiday sales to reach around $253 billion in 2025, with Cyber Week alone driving roughly 17% of that spend.

Great news for top-line growth. But for suppliers, Cyber Monday also unlocks a very specific kind of chaos: e-commerce deductions.

The three big Cyber Monday deduction buckets

Let’s break down the three buckets that tend to blow up after the big day.

1. Split shipments

One order.Two (or three) boxes.Multiple charges, tracking numbers, and expectations.

Split shipments can create:

• Customer confusion: “Why did I only get part of my order?”

• Billing complexity: Multiple freight lines, partial deliveries, different ship dates.

• Accounts payable (AP) questions: When the retailer’s AP team can’t reconcile units, freight, and timing, they err on the side of deductions.

The problem isn’t that split shipments exist—it’s that upstream data and downstream communication often don’t match.

2. Porch claims and delivery disputes

E-comm brings the “porch problem” front and center:

• Package shows as “delivered” in the carrier’s system.

• Customer swears “nothing was there.”

Someone is on the hook. Retailers increasingly lean toward “protect the shopper first, sort it out later.”

That often means:

• Instant credits from customer service

• Chargebacks or deductions that roll back to the supplier—especially on direct-to-consumer or marketplace models

Without clear rules of engagement and good data (photos, GPS pins, signed delivery, etc.), the brand ends up absorbing more than its fair share.

3. Marketplace fee math

If you sell through a major marketplace, Cyber Monday is where fee math can quietly eat your margin:

• Commissions that shift above certain price or category thresholds

• Advertising fees and sponsored placements triggered during peak hours

• “Customer satisfaction” and adjustment credits that show up on your settlement statement, not your invoice

Individually, these may look like small hits. Aggregated across Cyber Week, you can lose several points of margin without any obvious operational “error” to blame.

How to prepare in October and early November

The best Cyber Monday defense starts long before Thanksgiving.

1. Tighten carrier service-level agreements (SLAs)

   • Define who owns what when a package is lost, late, or damaged.

   • Make sure service credits and chargeback rules are understood on both sides.

2. Clean up product weights and dimensions

   • Bad data here is deduction fuel: wrong freight charges, misrated zones, and dimensional weight surprises.

   • Audit your top sellers and seasonal SKUs first.

3. Align with customer service scripts

   • If customer service agents reflexively say “We’ll just refund that” on every issue, guess where those credits go?

   • Align scripts so they reflect your agreements and give the brand a voice in high-cost scenarios.

4. Clarify who investigates what

   • For porch claims: who pulls delivery photos, who talks to carriers, who decides if a pattern is emerging?

   • For marketplace adjustments: who owns reconciling settlement statements against internal P&L?

Build a mini “Cyber Week war room”

You don’t need 20 people on Zoom all day. But you do want a small cross-functional group watching the same real-time story:

• Daily dashboards that surface:

  • Out-of-stock (OOS) alerts for key SKUs

  • Spikes in returns or refunds

  • Unusual patterns in fees or adjustments

• One shared Slack or Teams channel for Cyber Week

  • Sales, operations, finance, and information technology (IT) in the same conversation

  • Quick decisions about pausing ads, shifting inventory, or adjusting service responses

• End-of-week rapid recap

  • What went wrong?

  • What did we fix on the fly?

  • What do we need to change in the playbook before next year?

Fictional example (for illustration only)

Fictional example (not a real brand):A personal care brand sees record Cyber Monday sell-through—up 40% year over year. Their CEO is thrilled. So is the board. By mid-December, finance spots something ugly: a 7% drag on margin in their marketplace channel. Where did it come from? Higher-than-expected marketplace commissions during peak hours Auto-approved “customer satisfaction” credits for delayed deliveries A misconfigured rate card that over-refunded certain late shipments None of it shows up as a neat line in the trade budget. It’s buried in settlement statements and expense accounts. The sales win is real—but the profitability isn’t what everyone thought.

Again, completely made up, but painfully familiar to a lot of teams.

Why this matters for 2026 planning

E-commerce deductions aren’t just nuisance math. They:

• Distort your view of true channel profitability

• Show up in post-audit reviews and compliance scorecards

• Shape how retailers and marketplaces view you as a long-term partner

If you can walk into next year’s planning cycle and say:

• “Here’s what Cyber Week looked like on sales and net margin,” and

• “Here are the changes we’ve already made to reduce split shipments, porch claims, and bad-fee math,” …you instantly sound like a more mature, lower-risk supplier.

Woodridge Retail Group often sits in that middle seat—helping suppliers connect spikes in online volume to spikes in deductions and then decide where to attack first, not with big speeches, but with better questions and better dashboards.