Home topics news Image Credit: Curology on Unsplash News Small Business News SMEs must remain agile and transparent with customers to keep goods moving Denise McGrouther August 13, 2021 SMEs’reliance on eCommerce systems and communication has intensified as Australian cities impose lockdown restrictions to suppress the Delta variant. With this latest setback creating more uncertainty, it is worth looking back at how entrepreneurs have leaned into the COVID-19 crisis to keep their goods moving, with the most successful being those who were agile and transparent in keeping customers informed. As stay and work-from-home economies geared up and shoppers turned mostly online around the globe in 2020, demand for lifestyle goods in particular boomed. Surging online orders for items from wellness products to pet accessories contributed to a 25 per cent lift in outbound freight volumes handled by DHL’s Australian eCommerce division by year-end. Driving much of this volume was the meteoric rise in demand for kids toys and kitchenware, with outbound freight up 6000 per cent and 1000 per cent respectively, to destinations such as Canada, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom. This is a feat worth putting into context. Keeping freight moving over the last 18 months has been an enormous challenge, with only slivers of air freight capacity available thanks to a 90 per cent reduction in passenger flights and, in some countries, total closure of last mile and uplift postal services. From a costs perspective, freight rates per kilo in some cases rose nearly