It's important to understand what is in your shipping contract, especially if you are a high-volume shipper. Without carefully reviewing your contract terms, you could end up losing money for shipping errors you're not responsible for. Carrier pricing experts can evaluate your shipping records and evaluate your shipping contract to help you determine where you might be losing money and what you can do to improve your situation. But what exactly goes into these parcel services? Let's take a look at some of the parcel services offered by carrier pricing experts and how they can benefit your business.
Parcel Contract Benchmarking
Are you unsure if you're getting the best rates for your shipping volume? Carrier pricing experts offer parcel contract benchmarking services to help you determine which carriers offer better terms, rates, and incentives for your business. Parcel contract benchmarking also serves as a gauge with respect to customer satisfaction, parcel use, carrier likes, and cost reduction methods. The most common sector using parcel services that require regular benchmarking include retail businesses, e-commerce sites, and wholesale companies. Other companies, that take up second place, include those involved in third-party logistics (3PL), warehousing, manufacturing, and fulfillment.
Companies that routinely use parcel services to determine the best course of action for finding the right carriers can make revenues from under $100M to over $10B yearly.
Parcel Contract Auditing
A wide range of companies regularly take advantage of the services provided by the two top carriers, FedEx and UPS. By a margin of 4.5 to 1, most companies participating in surveys find that negotiating with carriers has become more difficult. Much of the technology related to parcel services involves the use of parcel contract auditing software or applications designed for the weekly auditing of small packages. Indeed, auditing is necessary, as half of the survey participants in logistics surveys regularly send out high volume shipments of about 2 million parcels annually. In 2018 alone, about 87 billion parcels were shipped internationally.
Are You Paying for More Than You Should Be?
When looking for a carrier for your shipping services, it's important to consider the speed and efficiency of their shipments. Carrier ought to provide fast pick-ups and deliveries, but also fully traceable delivery monitoring. Traceable delivery monitoring allows your parcel pricing experts to determine whether you're paying for shipments that were made late due to issues with the carrier rather than issues with your company.
Negotiating parcel services contracts with the carriers needs to be done by experienced parcel contract negotiators – companies that audit carrier contracts and save shippers as much as 8% in the loss of funding due to invoice errors and contractual waivers and oversights. Parcel pricing experts recommend that companies carefully review their logistics contracts before they agree to the terms. It can save you thousands of dollars by knowing what you are signing. Call us today so you can reduce your shipping costs and increase your bottom line.