Retailers have made strategic investments this year to gird for just this kind of crush. Target, for example, boosted its corps of season workers this year at its online fulfillment warehouses. Kohl’s has been ramping up its “ship from store” program, which aims to get digital orders on customers’ doorsteps much faster. And J.C. Penney caught up to many of its retailing counterparts by adding “buy online, pick up in store” services across all of its stores.

AD

AD

Now, these final innings of the holiday shopping season will show whether or not those moves paid off.

The retail industry, in theory, shouldn’t be caught entirely flat-footed by the surge in late shopping. In a presidential election year, experts say that shoppers are typically distracted in the early part of the holiday season: They’re glued to the news, and even when they turn away from it, the airwaves are filled with campaign advertising. But they tend to make up for that pause later in December.

Certain retailers seem to be making a particularly concerted effort to court these procrastinators: Walmart, for example, is pledging that customers who place online orders by 6 p.m. on Dec. 23 will be able to retrieve their items by 6 p.m. on Dec. 24. Meanwhile, Amazon.com is heavily promoting its Prime Now service, which is available in a limited number of cities and promises to deliver gifts to shoppers up until 11:59 p.m. on Christmas Eve. (Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)

AD

AD

And, across the entire online shopping universe, Adobe found that shipping costs between Dec. 16 and Dec. 19 were some 10 percent lower than they were during the same period last year. That suggests that plenty of retailers were dangling free shipping offers to lure latecomers.

If retailers succeed in managing a deluge of last-minute orders, it could help pad their total holiday sales haul and win them some loyalty from harried customers. But you don’t have to look too far into the past to see what a publicity nightmare it can be if a big batch of gifts don’t make it to shoppers when they were promised.

AD

In 2013, there was widespread shopper frustration when UPS and FedEx failed to deliver millions of packages in time for Christmas. Retailers apparently didn’t give great estimates of how many packages they’d be funneling to the shippers during the home stretch, and a winter storm added an extra layer of difficulty.

AD

Retailers hope that nimbler supply chains, along with offerings such as store pickup, will help them avoid such a debacle this time around. And shippers, too, have been working to build out their capacity to accommodate more packages.

During the holiday season so far, Adobe says retailers have run up $79.2 billion in online sales, an increase of nearly 11 percent compared to last year. That is significantly stronger than the 3.6 percent sales growth that is expected for the industry overall in November and December.