Container shipping schedule reliability has fallen to its lowest level since 2022, and DP World is not describing it as a blip. Its framing is that unreliability has become the persistent state of the market rather than a disruption that will pass. If your European stock arrives by sea, that is a planning assumption you may need to change.

Reliability is a quieter problem than cost. A freight rate rise announces itself on an invoice and everybody in the business sees it. A sailing that arrives eleven days late shows up somewhere else entirely, usually as a product page that says out of stock during the two weeks you had planned a campaign around.

The difference matters because brands hedge the two risks differently. Rate volatility gets managed with contracts and forward booking. Schedule volatility only gets managed with time or with stock, and most brands reach for time first. They pad the plan, order earlier, and accept that working capital sits on the water for longer. That works until the padding has to cover a tail that keeps getting longer.

• Build your cover from the worst recent arrivals rather than the average, because the average hides exactly the sailings that hurt
• Separate your safety stock decision from your reorder decision, or a single late vessel moves both at once
• Watch what a stockout does to marketplace ranking, not just to the orders missed while the listing is down

Stock held inside Europe is the version of this that does not depend on the ocean behaving. The sailing still happens, and it is still unreliable, but it lands upstream of the customer rather than between you and them. Your European buyer sees a domestic delivery from local stock, and the variability lives in your replenishment cycle where you can absorb it.

That is a different conversation from cost per unit shipped. It is a question about where you want your uncertainty to sit. Brands running direct cross-border fulfilment carry it in the customer experience. Brands with EU-local inventory carry it in the warehouse, which is the cheaper place for it by a wide margin once you count lost listings and customer service load.

Expandly positions stock in our Netherlands warehouse so European orders ship locally, which puts ocean variability behind your delivery promise instead of inside it.