When you sit down to negotiate with carriers like FedEx or UPS, the odds are often stacked against you. They have teams of analysts and mountains of data they use to build their pricing models and strategies. In many cases, they know your shipping profile better than you do. This information imbalance puts you at a significant disadvantage. To secure the best rates, you need to level the playing field. That means gaining access to the same deep, carrier-grade insights they use. This guide explains how to arm yourself with that data, using the Shipware Spend Management Portal to change the dynamic and negotiate from a position of strength.
With consumers shopping wherever, whenever, and however they like, brands are now relying on data for business success. In fact, according to IBM, 62% of retailers say using information (including big data) and analytics is giving their organizations a competitive advantage. While data is a valuable asset, many businesses struggle to use it effectively. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that businesses currently capture only one-third of their data’s potential value. Let the following four strategies help you tap into the full potential of your business data.
1) Harness the Right Business Data
When it comes to winning in e-commerce, you need the right set of information to uncover hidden insights and make informed decisions for your business. You can source business data from three departments in your organization. Make sure it flows seamlessly through all departments and everyone has access to it through a single platform. These departments include:
Marketing Department:
This department has access to data you can use to deliver hyper-personalized experiences to customers. Empower your marketing team with artificial intelligence (AI)-powered analytics to allow them to collect data from all touch points and track customer behavior in real time. Also, leverage predictive analytics to understand future consumer behavior and make relevant product recommendations.
Customer Service Department:
The information accumulated during support operations can help you improve your customer experience and build brand loyalty. Microsoft’s State of Customer Service Report states that 95% of consumers are loyal to a brand because of their customer service. To leverage customer service information, use an analytics tool that offers in-depth insight into what takes place during each customer interaction and tracks metrics like reply time and first contact resolution.
Shipping Department:
Accurate shipping data is key to reducing logistics costs and remaining profitable. Instead of relying on data from carriers that do not show industry benchmarks or competitor pricing differences, invest in AI-driven tools. For instance, Shipware’s Portal, powered by their Krystal AI tool, gives a complete data breakdown of your company’s shipping and finds areas where you are being overcharged. This unique insight will help you improve operations and optimize your carrier pricing.
2) Track the Right Metrics
To turn your data into actionable insights that help you make profitable business decisions, it is important for you to track the right digital marketing metrics. Here are three commercial metrics you should track to increase your revenue:
Revenue by Traffic Source:
This metric shows you which channels drive traffic to your e-commerce site and where to invest your marketing budget. You can track Revenue by Traffic Source with Google Analytics or a similar tool. But remember that a channel generating traffic today might not do so forever. So it is best to acquire traffic from various sources.
Average Order Value:
Average order value (AOV) tracks the average amount of money a customer spends per transaction on your website or mobile app. To calculate your company’s average order value, divide your total revenue by the number of orders. And if you have a low AOV, you can increase it by upselling to customers and offering free shipping.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV):
With this metric, you can monitor how much revenue a customer will bring your company throughout their lifetime. Use predictive analytics to forecast your customers’ lifetime value and send relevant offers to retain them. Besides the metrics mentioned above, track your social media return on investment and cart abandonment rate. Before selecting metrics, define your goals and measure results for the user cases most important to you.
3) Enrich Your Data
To get more value from your data, consider data enrichment. This strategy can help you unlock new business opportunities and increase your revenue. Research from Experian’s Global Data Management Benchmark report states that over the next 12 months from 2018, 35% of organizations are planning to undergo a data enrichment project. Below are two ways you can enrich your data:
Clean It Up:
Having poor quality information can cost you time and money. Companies lose about 5.6% of their annual revenue to poor quality data according to a report from Royal Mail Data Services. So use enrichment tools to verify and correct customer information. This cleansing process will improve your data’s quality and marketing effectiveness. Additionally, clean your data continuously and choose an enrichment solution that can rapidly analyze information.
Leverage Third-Party Data:
To identify niche segments within your customer base and reach a new audience, combine first and third party data. Before purchasing third-party data, ask providers where they get it from. Furthermore, ensure what you are buying is undertaken in accordance with data protection principles and regulatory guidance. And for best results, pre-clean your data before sending it out for enrichment by correcting obvious mistakes like email syntax errors. Also, reconcile new customer information immediately for data accuracy.
4) Develop a Data Strategy
You need a data strategy to create new growth, cut waste, and improve company performance. A 2017 research paper from Econsultancy found that business leaders who exceeded their goals in 2016 had a clear data strategy. Creating a data strategy is not for the faint-hearted, this is why few organizations create one according to a 2011 report from BeyeNetwork. Despite this, here are some components to include in your strategy:
Align Data With Your Business Objectives:
Identify your business objectives and articulate how you can use data to attain them. Select three to five objectives for your business data to ensure your strategy is focused and achievable. In addition, define what success looks like early and make sure it is related to your company’s key performance indicators (KPIs).
Hire the Right Talent:
Getting the most from your business data relies on having data analysts who can translate it into useful knowledge. Before recruiting analysts, identify your business objectives and outline the skills you require to meet these goals. Look out for analytics experts with functional skill sets and subject matter expertise. You also need a clear plan for developing internal capabilities.
Create a Roadmap:
Develop a road map to determine the steps you need to take to move forward with your strategy. When creating a roadmap, start with your endpoint in mind, and identify a pipeline of activities that will take you towards your goal while prioritizing areas that need immediate attention. Additionally, ensure your strategy is flexible enough to accommodate future changes like new technologies. You can also hire a Chief Data Officer to help you develop your strategy and improve business operations.
1) Understanding Your Shipping Spend: The First Step to Optimization
If you feel like you’re flying blind when it comes to your shipping costs, you’re not alone. Many businesses only see the total on their carrier invoices, missing the crucial details hidden within. True optimization begins with a deep, granular understanding of your shipping spend. It’s about moving past the big number and getting into the specifics of every surcharge, accessorial fee, and rate application. Gaining this level of clarity is the foundational step that makes every other cost-saving initiative possible. Without it, you’re just guessing. With it, you can make strategic, data-driven decisions that have a real impact on your bottom line and operational efficiency.
Gaining On-Demand, Real-Time Visibility
Static, month-end reports are a thing of the past. To effectively manage logistics, you need access to your shipping data as it happens. This means having on-demand, real-time analytics at your fingertips, allowing you to spot trends, catch errors, and identify opportunities the moment they arise. Imagine being able to drill down from a high-level dashboard showing your total spend for the quarter to the tracking details and cost breakdown of a single shipment in just a few clicks. This is the kind of visibility that transforms your shipping department from a cost center into a strategic asset, enabling you to answer questions from finance or leadership with confidence and accuracy.
The Strategic Advantage of Carrier-Grade Data
What if you could see your shipping profile the same way your carriers do? Carriers like FedEx and UPS use incredibly detailed data to determine your rates, assess your profitability as a client, and build their negotiation strategies. When you only have access to your own limited invoice data, you’re at a significant disadvantage. Leveraging a platform that provides carrier-grade data levels the playing field. It gives you access to the same deep insights, allowing you to understand your own shipping characteristics and benchmark your performance, which is essential for making smarter choices and negotiating better deals.
2) Key Features of Shipware’s Spend Management Portal
Having access to carrier-grade data is one thing; making sense of it is another. This is where a dedicated platform becomes essential. Shipware’s Spend Management Portal is designed to translate millions of complex data points into clear, actionable insights. It acts as a central hub for all your shipping and logistics analytics, eliminating the need to piece together information from different carrier websites or clunky spreadsheets. The portal provides a user-friendly interface that organizes your data, visualizes trends, and highlights the specific areas where you can improve efficiency and reduce costs, giving your team the tools they need to manage your shipping spend proactively.
Customized Reporting and KPI Tracking
Every department looks at shipping data through a different lens. Your finance team needs high-level budget adherence reports, while your logistics manager needs to track on-time delivery performance and cost-per-shipment. The portal allows you to create customized reports and track the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter most to each stakeholder. This ensures everyone in your organization is working from a single source of truth, tailored to their specific needs. You can easily generate accurate reports for budget planning, performance reviews, and strategic meetings, making it simple to communicate the value and challenges within your logistics operations.
Predictive Budgeting and Forecasting
One of the biggest challenges for high-volume shippers is budgeting for unpredictable costs, especially with annual carrier rate increases. The Spend Management Portal’s premium features include advanced tools like a Rate Increase Calculator, which helps you model the financial impact of future transportation costs. Instead of being surprised by the General Rate Increase (GRI) each year, you can proactively forecast its effect on your specific shipping profile. This allows you to build more accurate, predictable budgets and adjust your strategy accordingly, turning a reactive scramble into a proactive planning session.
3) Turning Shipping Data into Strategic Wins
Data is only valuable when it leads to action. The ultimate goal of analyzing your shipping spend is to turn those insights into tangible results that strengthen your business. This means using your newfound knowledge to secure better carrier contracts, build more reliable budgets, and streamline your entire supply chain. When you can clearly see every aspect of your shipping operations, you can move beyond simply putting out fires and start making strategic improvements that drive long-term growth and profitability. This data-driven approach empowers you to take control of your logistics and achieve significant competitive advantages.
Strengthen Carrier Contract Negotiations
Walking into a carrier negotiation armed with detailed, carrier-grade data completely changes the conversation. This information is powerful because it’s the same data carriers use to evaluate how valuable your business is to them. When you can pinpoint exactly where your rates deviate from industry benchmarks or identify unfavorable terms, you can negotiate from a position of strength. At Shipware, our team of former carrier executives uses these insights to help clients secure best-in-class agreements. We understand the carriers’ playbooks because we helped write them, giving you an unmatched advantage at the negotiating table for your next parcel or LTL contract.
Create Accurate and Predictable Budgets
Budgeting for shipping can often feel like a shot in the dark, with fluctuating volumes and surprise surcharges making it difficult to forecast expenses. With a clear view of your historical data and the ability to model future scenarios, you can create budgets with a much higher degree of accuracy. The portal allows you to easily see how factors like rate increases or shifts in shipping zones will affect your spending. You can then generate straightforward reports that clearly explain these costs to your finance department and executive team, building confidence and predictability into your financial planning process.
Optimize Your Overall Supply Chain
The insights you gain from a spend management portal extend far beyond just carrier pricing. A detailed analysis of your shipping data can reveal critical opportunities to improve your entire supply chain. For example, you might discover that a different mix of carriers could improve delivery times, or that you could save significantly through modal optimization by shifting certain shipments from parcel to LTL. These insights help you make smarter decisions about everything from warehouse placement to carrier diversification, leading to a more resilient, efficient, and cost-effective logistics network.
4) Getting Started with the Spend Management Portal
Taking the first step toward data-driven shipping management should be simple and straightforward. We believe that every business deserves access to the tools that can help them succeed, which is why we’ve designed our Spend Management Portal to be accessible and easy to implement. Whether you’re an existing Shipware client or just beginning to explore ways to optimize your shipping, there’s a clear path to getting started. The goal is to get powerful analytics into your hands so you can begin uncovering savings and improving your operations without a lengthy or complicated setup process.
Access Tiers and Pricing
We want to remove as many barriers as possible for businesses looking to gain control over their shipping data. That’s why basic access to the Spend Management Portal is provided free of charge to clients who use our other core services, such as Invoice Audit & Recovery or Contract Optimization. This allows you to benefit from our full suite of optimization solutions while using the portal as your central analytics hub. For businesses that need more advanced capabilities or wish to use the portal as a standalone solution, we also offer premium access with features like the Rate Increase Calculator and other powerful forecasting tools.
Try the Portal with Your Own Data
The best way to understand the power of our portal is to see it in action with your own shipping data. A generic demo can only show you so much, but analyzing your actual historical shipping information will immediately reveal relevant and actionable insights. We invite you to try the Spend Management Portal for free for 30 days to experience its capabilities firsthand. This no-obligation trial allows you to see exactly how it works with your unique shipping profile and discover real savings opportunities. Simply request a demo, and our team can get you set up to start exploring your data.
You Are Sitting on a Goldmine: Use It
Apart from the strategies explained above, to fully take advantage of your data, you need to have a clear understanding of the goals you want to achieve. Equally, have a data governance framework to address privacy, security, and transparency issues. You are most likely sitting on a wellspring of information that is silently waiting for you to leverage its value. Experiment with a few of these strategies to find out what works best in your situation and go from there.
Frequently Asked Questions
My carrier already provides reports. How is the data in the Spend Management Portal different? The reports you get from your carrier show you what you spent, but they don’t show you what you could have spent. They are designed to serve the carrier’s interests, not yours. Our portal provides carrier-grade data, which means you see your shipping profile from their perspective, complete with industry benchmarks. This context is what gives you the upper hand in identifying overcharges and negotiating better terms.
How exactly does having this data help me negotiate a better contract with UPS or FedEx? Negotiations are all about leverage. When you can walk into a meeting with a detailed analysis showing exactly how your shipping profile compares to market rates and where specific surcharges are hurting you most, the conversation changes. Instead of asking for a general discount, you can make specific, data-backed requests. It shows the carrier you’ve done your homework and shifts the power dynamic in your favor.
My team doesn’t have data scientists. Is this platform complicated to use? Not at all. The portal is designed for logistics and finance professionals, not data engineers. It takes millions of complex data points and presents them in clear, easy-to-understand dashboards and reports. The goal is to give you actionable insights quickly, so you can spend your time making strategic decisions, not trying to decipher spreadsheets.
The post talks about a broader data strategy. Does this portal only focus on shipping? While the portal’s primary function is to analyze your shipping spend, the insights it provides are a critical piece of your overall business strategy. The data can inform decisions well beyond logistics, such as warehouse placement, marketing promotions for free shipping, and financial forecasting. It provides the foundational shipping intelligence you need to make smarter, more integrated business decisions across departments.
What’s the first step to see if this is right for my business? The best way to see the value is to look at your own data. We offer a 30-day trial where we load your historical shipping information into the portal. This lets you see the platform in action with your specific shipping profile, so you can immediately identify real opportunities for savings. There’s no better way to understand its impact than by seeing what it reveals about your own operations.
Key Takeaways
- Negotiate from a position of strength: Arm yourself with the same detailed, carrier-grade data that carriers use. This deep insight into your own shipping profile is the key to securing more favorable rates and terms.
- Make your data work for you: A dedicated spend management portal turns complex shipping information into clear, actionable insights. Use customized reports and forecasting tools to make proactive decisions instead of just reacting to invoices.
- Turn insights into bottom-line impact: Apply your data analysis to achieve tangible business wins, such as strengthening carrier contracts, creating predictable budgets, and optimizing your entire supply chain for greater efficiency.