Most brands pick a carrier they trust and stop thinking about it. That works right up until the day it doesn't. In Italy, the day it doesn't comes around more often than almost anywhere else in Europe, and when it arrives, a single-carrier setup has no answer. The 2024 and 2025 peak seasons proved it, and 2026 has only raised the stakes.
When one carrier becomes one point of failure
Two recent examples make the risk concrete. In late April 2024, an Assotir-called strike put BRT deliveries into limbo across large parts of Italy for days. On 8 November 2024, a strike out of GLS's Tortona hub caused heavy delays through Piedmont and Lombardy, landing squarely in Black Friday week. If either carrier was your only carrier, your customers waited, and there was nothing you could do about it.
The five ways a single carrier leaves you exposed
Our carrier-management partner Qapla' frames it as five scenarios, and every one of them is outside your control:
- Strikes and labour action
- Seasonal volume spikes the network cannot absorb
- Sudden tariff and surcharge increases
- Operational or network failures at the carrier
- Geographic coverage gaps: islands, remote areas, restricted-traffic zones
A single carrier gives you no move to make when any of these hit. A multi-carrier operation simply reroutes.
What downtime actually costs
The damage is not vague, it is arithmetic. Take your daily orders, your average cart value, and the days you are stuck:
Orders per day × average cart value × days of outage = revenue at risk
Worked example: 150 orders × €65 × 3 days = €29,250 exposed in a single week.
That figure ignores the follow-on cost: refund requests, support load, chargebacks, and the customers who simply do not come back. For most brands the real number is higher than the formula shows.
2026 raised the stakes
Cost pressure made carrier flexibility a margin issue, not just a reliability one. Through spring 2026, Confetra reported air freight tariffs up 38% in a single month and container rates up around 20%, while Poste Italiane pushed through AGCOM-approved increases of 5 to 6%. When one carrier reprices, being able to shift volume to another is the difference between absorbing the hit and passing it to your customers.
What a multi-carrier operation looks like in practice
Diversification is not "add a second carrier and hope." It is three disciplines:
- Segment by geography and weight to find where your primary carrier underperforms.
- Define automatic fallback rules on weight, destination postcode, and cash-on-delivery amount, so rerouting happens without anyone touching it during a disruption.
- Monitor performance over time and move volume to whoever is actually delivering.
This is exactly how Fulfilment4Italy already runs, every day, across roughly 65,000 orders a month. Poste Italiane, BRT/DPD, GLS, and Amazon Shipping sit behind one rule set, and when one falters we route around it before your customers notice. The strategy the data recommends is not a project for us. It is the default. For the fuller case on why Italy in particular demands it, see The Importance of Choosing Multiple Last Mile Carriers in Italy.
The bottom line
A single carrier is a bet that nothing goes wrong in a country where something regularly does. Multi-carrier is not more complexity to manage, it is complexity we manage so you do not have to.
Running on one carrier in Italy? Let's pressure-test what an outage would cost you. Get in touch for a custom quote.