Where Is My Furniture?
If you've been waiting for a backorder lately and the ETA keeps changing, you may be wondering: where exactly is that container?
Why do furniture ETAs keep changing? An early peak season, typhoons and port congestion are delaying containers. Here's what's happening and what we're doing.
Importing furniture has never been completely predictable. We order months in advance and plan for when a container will leave the factory, how long it will take to get to Vancouver and when the product will arrive at our warehouse.
Lately, those dates have been moving. More than usual.
And there are some pretty good reasons why.
Then came the typhoons
Just as the shipping system was dealing with an unusually early peak season, the weather became another problem.
A series of typhoons hit East Asia this summer, causing port closures and significant disruption.
The impact wasn't limited to China. We also bring a significant amount of furniture from Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, and ocean shipping doesn't operate as a collection of completely separate routes. The same vessels, equipment and shipping networks move throughout Asia. When major ports become backed up and vessels fall days behind schedule, those delays can ripple through other ports and sailings across the region.
That's where a few days of bad weather can turn into weeks of disruption.
A port doesn't simply reopen the next morning and everything goes back to normal. There are ships waiting to get in, containers waiting to leave, terminals that are full and vessels that are now arriving out of sequence.
And the effects continue well beyond the actual storms. Once vessels are out of position and ports are dealing with a backlog, it can take weeks for schedules to recover.
Just how bad have the delays been?
This is the part that surprised us.
According to Sea-Intelligence, only 32.3% of container vessels in Asia arrived on schedule in August. In China overall, it was just 23.9%.
In August, schedule reliability at Shanghai was only 12.2%.
So if it feels like nothing is running on schedule with your suppliers, there's a reason.
Globally, things haven't been much better. Vessel schedule reliability dropped to 49.9% in August, the lowest level since September 2022. And vessels that arrived late were, on average, almost seven days behind schedule.
Unfortunately, seven days late doesn't always mean seven days late
This is one of the frustrating things about ocean freight.
If a vessel is delayed by a week, it doesn't necessarily mean our container simply arrives seven days later.
A container can miss its scheduled vessel. It can get rolled onto the next sailing. A routing can change. A port can become congested. A ship arriving late into one port can then be late leaving for the next one.
One delay can very quickly turn into another.
We're also seeing cancelled or "blank" sailings. Between September 28 and November 1, Drewry reported 58 cancelled sailings across the major East-West shipping routes, with 64% of those cancellations affecting the eastbound Trans-Pacific.
The containers still have to go somewhere. There are just fewer sailing options available to move them.
What does that mean for us — and you?
It means we're doing a lot of container tracking.
We have furniture that's finished. We have furniture sitting at ports. We have containers on the water. And sometimes we have containers whose ETA seems to change every time we look at it.
We know that's frustrating when you're waiting for a backorder, planning an installation or trying to get new product onto your retail floor.
It's frustrating for us too.
We plan our inventory months in advance, but once a container enters the international shipping network, there are some things we simply can't control.
What we can do is stay on top of it.
Our team is constantly monitoring incoming shipments, checking schedules and updating ETAs as we get new information.
Why are we telling you all this?
Because we know how frustrating it can be when order ETAs continually move.
When you order a chair or bed from us, there's a journey between the factory and our Burnaby warehouse that most people never see.
And this year has been particularly challenging.
The good news is that a lot of furniture is on its way.
So if you're watching the ETA on a backordered item move and wondering where your furniture is, know that we're doing everything possible behind the scenes to get it to you as quickly as we can. Unfortunately, not everything along the way is within our control. But you can always call us — we're happy to talk through what's happening, where your order is and what we're currently seeing for timing.
Product that is part of the story.
