Negotiating with carriers like UPS and FedEx can feel like you’re playing a game where they know all the rules. They have decades of pricing data from thousands of customers, while you only have your own shipping profile. This information gap makes it tough to know if you’re truly getting the best possible rates and terms. To level the playing field, you need access to the same kind of intelligence. By combining insider expertise from former carrier executives with powerful analytics, you can walk into negotiations with confidence. The Shipware Spend Management Portal then gives you the ongoing data you need to manage that hard-won contract effectively.
The logistics market, including shipping, was $1.7 trillion in 2017, according to the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals’ 2018 Annual State of Logistics. A portion of that was e-commerce sales, with $99 billion in parcel delivery costs in 2017, a figure that rose 7% from the previous year. And that number is only getting bigger. For example, Amazon’s 2018 shipping costs were $27.7 billion, almost 28% more than 2017 figures. The take-home message is that shipping can be a tremendous expense for companies, whether sending retail items to consumers or stocking businesses with needed supplies. If your company isn’t managing its shipping freight rates, it’s leaving money on the table. Smart companies realize that they can’t do everything themselves. Companies have core competencies and know that sometimes it’s better to outsource certain functions or to get expert help in order to save money or operate more effectively. It may take a little staff time, or start-up costs/operating costs to continue working with a new vendor. But sometimes those costs are funded with savings, making it a win-win situation. Imagine saving 10-30% of your total shipping costs without it costing you anything. Or having an expert, who used to be a carrier or 3PL executive, negotiating the minutiae of your shipping contract – terms you didn’t know you could negotiate because you didn’t have the background or benchmarking information at your fingertips. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Some companies outsource their shipping, freight rates management, warehousing, fulfillment and transportation to a 3PL. It’s a popular option for good reason. In fact, the percentage of a shippers’ transportation spend managed by 3PLs was 50%, according to the 2019 Third-Party Logistics Study: The State of Operating Logistics 23rd Annual 3PL Study. If they’re doing a great job, then they can save a company money and allow them to focus on what they do best: production, manufacturing and sales. Let’s put this aside for a minute, and talk about how another type of company can positively impact your bottom line for shipping. We’ll focus on three services: refund recovery, contract optimization, and transportation intelligence.
More Than Just Cost Savings: Shipware’s Approach
While the immediate goal is often to cut down on shipping expenses, a truly effective strategy looks at the bigger picture. It’s not just about finding the cheapest rate; it’s about building a smarter, more resilient logistics operation that serves your business and your customers. This is where a partnership approach makes all the difference. Instead of a one-size-fits-all solution, the focus should be on a custom strategy that aligns with your specific operational needs and customer promises. By analyzing every facet of your shipping data, from carrier contracts to delivery performance, you can uncover opportunities that go far beyond simple cost reduction and create a real competitive advantage.
Improving Delivery Speed
In a world of on-demand everything, getting packages to customers quickly is non-negotiable. The challenge is doing it without letting your costs spiral out of control. A consultative approach to shipping management helps businesses achieve both. By creating custom solutions for services like UPS, FedEx, and LTL, you can optimize your carrier mix to meet delivery windows efficiently. This might involve modal optimization to find the right service level for each package or diversifying your carriers to leverage regional strengths. There’s no single magic bullet for saving money on shipping; the key is to build a flexible, data-driven strategy that ensures your packages arrive on time, every time, without overpaying for services you don’t need.
Enhancing Customer Satisfaction
The final mile of delivery is one of the most critical touchpoints in the customer journey. A seamless delivery experience can create a loyal customer for life, while a delay or issue can send them straight to a competitor. Ultimately, the main goal is to help businesses spend less on shipping, improve how fast packages arrive, and keep customers happy. Gaining full visibility into your shipping operations with powerful reporting and KPIs allows you to monitor carrier performance and hold them accountable. Furthermore, services like automated invoice audit and recovery ensure you get refunds for service failures, like late deliveries, turning a potential negative customer experience into a corrected action and a cost-saving for your business.
Are You Getting the Refunds You’re Owed?
It’s nice to imagine that your bills from FedEx and UPS are 100% accurate and that all service was delivered with the promised transit times and delivery times. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. More than $2 billion in FedEx, UPS, and LTL refunds are unclaimed each year. Shipware’s goal is for you to claim your refunds, and save on future shipping as well. Carriers offer guarantees for a reason – so you get the service they promise, or they refund the money. But if no one is watching closely, those refunds aren’t going to come. They require someone paying attention and filing those refund claims. If you send a lot of packages, it’s impossible for a human to efficiently do this – it requires technology to comb through bills looking for errors that need rectifying. If you’re not using a top-notch refund recovery software program, you are paying carriers for services you’re not receiving. That’s so nice of you! Shipware’s customers use our propriety audit software to reduce the weekly invoice amounts automatically, saving them 1-5% on average. This includes parcel and freight cost for carrier and contract compliance issues. It’s not a difficult process. Customers easily load their shipping invoices into our Krystal software, and it identifies incorrect surcharges and unclaimed refunds, applying for those refunds on the company’s behalf. There’s no customer intervention needed. Customers don’t have to file for refunds after an audit. Our team does it automatically on their behalf. Those refunds are credited directly on your billing. Your staff doesn’t have to do anything after providing one-time access to the carrier billing. It’s a “set it and forget it” type of system. We don’t actually recommend forgetting it, though. You’ll want to see how much money is coming back onto your invoices as credits, so you can tell others at the company how much money you’re saving them. We mentioned we’d come back to 3PLs. We also audit 3PL agreements, as they almost all fail on their service level agreements (SLA) in some way. When outsourcing a lot of financial responsibilities to a 3PL, you want to ensure that they’re doing their job and you’re not paying more than you agreed to with the freight quote. 3PLs will do a better job when they know you’re watching, and Shipware can audit every transaction and bill of lading to confirm compliance with the contract terms and SLA. Our customers are saving up to 30% of 3PL spend from using our audit services, without additional staff time from your company.
Streamline Your Payments with Parcel Pay
After identifying billing errors and securing refunds, the next step is actually paying the invoices. For companies shipping thousands of packages a week, managing and paying carrier invoices can feel like a full-time job. It often involves manual data entry, cross-referencing multiple systems, and a complicated approval process that eats up valuable time. This is where a centralized payment system becomes essential. Shipware’s Parcel Platform for Payments, Approval & Reporting simplifies this entire workflow by consolidating all your carrier invoices into one easy-to-use digital platform. It automates the process, allowing your team to review, approve, and pay invoices efficiently, freeing them up to focus on more strategic tasks than tedious paperwork.
The real power of Parcel Pay is how it integrates with our invoice audit service. Our audit software automatically scrubs your invoices for errors and service failures, and our team files for refunds on your behalf. Those credits are applied directly to your carrier accounts. Parcel Pay then presents you with the corrected, lower-cost invoice for approval. This creates a seamless, closed-loop system where you not only find savings but also ensure you only pay what you truly owe. It eliminates the risk of paying an incorrect bill while waiting for a credit to appear weeks later, giving your finance team a clear and accurate picture of your shipping spend each week.
As an added benefit, clients who use our Parcel Pay or invoice audit services receive complimentary access to our powerful Spend Management Portal. This isn’t just a basic dashboard; it’s a comprehensive business intelligence tool that provides real-time visibility into your shipping operations. You can create personalized dashboards for different stakeholders in your company, from executives who need a high-level overview to analysts who want to dig into the details. The portal gives you access to the same kind of granular shipping data your carriers use, empowering you to make smarter, data-driven decisions to manage your supply chain and reduce costs even further.
How to Negotiate a Better Carrier Contract
Of course, many companies have great negotiators on staff. But do they have access to databases with $2 billion in shipping spend, to know what’s possible for discounting? Here’s a secret. Some key members of Shipware’s staff used to be carrier executives, and negotiated agreements on behalf of the carriers. Combined, our staff has more than 200 collective years of this type of pricing expertise. And now they share that expertise with shippers. They understand the rate benchmarks and what carriers can and may discount for shipping freight rates and parcel rates, for pickup and delivery. This inside information is important, because carrier pricing agreements are confidential. Companies can’t compare notes with colleagues without violating these agreements, making it difficult for shippers to understand whether they are well-served by the contract. Using an outside analyst at Shipware allows a company to gain advantages of negotiating with a more complete deck of cards, without violating any carrier agreements. While it may not feel like the shipper has any power in the carrier pricing arrangement, you have more than you think – even if you’re not willing to walk away from the carrier relationship in a failed negotiation. The negotiation process starts with a thorough evaluation of a company’s shipping profile. Shipware analyzes the contract by considering: contract terms, current discounts for surcharges, pickup and delivery trends, LTL shipments, freight classification, freight service, shipping rates, delivery times, ZIP codes, transit times, delivery times, minimum pricing parameters, dimensional pricing, parcel and freight volume, and its own benchmarking rates. This allows the experts to understand the available cost-saving targets, and to develop a customized business case. The Shipware experts then coach the shipper’s team through the negotiation process, with specific pricing requests that can be given to the carriers, so your company can get the best available terms and rates from your preferred carriers. If it doesn’t work, the shipper is not out any money, as fees are self-funded from carrier savings. That’s how much Shipware believes in its value. Shipware can offer a similar service for 3PL contracts as well, focusing on benchmarking rates, SLA and contract terms. The problem with 3PLs is that the contracts disguise the actual costs, making it impossible for shippers to know if they’re getting the best-in-class rates. They may apply fees and surcharges that are not needed or disclosed, like for LTL shipments or origin and destination fees. The SLA may not be optimized or implemented fully, yet there is no recourse for underperformance, and the performance metrics themselves may not be tracked or easy to find. Our clients are able to improve cost savings with a comprehensive Shipware analysis and evaluation, whether negotiating on your own or with Shipware taking on that role. If the current 3PL isn’t working out, Shipware can also identify other 3PL partners who might be a better fit. As with carrier negotiations, the Shipware fees are paid with realized savings. While this negotiation service can stand alone, it makes sense that after getting the better rates, you would want to continually audit the bill of lading or invoices when the new rates take effect. That ensures that the shipper is adhering to its terms and that all applicable discounts and refunds are applied.
Turn Your Shipping Data into Real Savings
At the heart of our business is Krystal, an optimized artificial intelligence software platform that includes our database of pricing knowledge and helps customers generate data specific to their company and usage. The state-of-the-art user interfaces allows customers to see their shipping data displayed in interactive and dynamic charts. Clients access the system through a portal, to see KPIs and essential data. They allow for accurate decision making on cost-savings. Meanwhile, the data is stored and processed with cloud-based technology, minimizing the client’s computing resources and allowing them to access it from anywhere. The platform employs predictive analytics and machine learning technology, to provide those cost-saving analytics. It performs the proprietary invoice audits and monitors carrier and contract compliance. It’s always running, so the company doesn’t have to devote its own resources.
Key Features of the Spend Management Portal
The platform’s real power lies in its interactive capabilities. The Spend Management Portal isn’t just for looking at past performance; it’s a dynamic tool for shaping your future shipping strategy. It allows you to move from reactive analysis to proactive planning, giving you the controls to model different outcomes and prepare for changes in the market. This is where you can truly get ahead of rising costs and make decisions that directly impact your bottom line. The portal is designed to provide clarity and control over your shipping spend through several key functions.
Test Cost-Saving Scenarios
One of the most valuable features is the ability to play out “what-if” scenarios with your own data. You can test different ways to save money on shipping, whether your business is growing or shrinking. For example, you can model the financial impact of shifting a percentage of your volume to a regional carrier or see how a change in service levels would affect your overall costs. This takes the guesswork out of strategic decisions, allowing you to validate a plan with hard numbers before you commit to it, ensuring you choose the most effective cost-saving measures.
Track Rate Increase Impacts
Carrier rate increases are an annual reality, but their exact impact on your budget can be hard to predict. The portal gives you a clear view of how things like higher shipping rates or new surcharges affect your costs. Instead of waiting for the bill to see the damage, you can proactively analyze the effect of a General Rate Increase (GRI) on your specific shipping profile. This foresight is critical for accurate budgeting and gives you the data you need to address the impact with your carrier during contract negotiations.
Create Custom Dashboards
Different roles within your company require different views of your shipping data. You can create personalized dashboards for various people in your company, from top leaders to data experts. Your CFO might want a high-level summary of total spend versus budget, while a logistics manager needs to drill down into on-time delivery performance by carrier and region. These custom reporting dashboards ensure that every stakeholder gets the precise information they need, in a format that’s easy to digest, making the data useful across the entire organization.
Improve Budget Accuracy
Predictability is key to a healthy budget. By leveraging the historical data and trend analysis within the portal, you can spot patterns in your shipping costs, which helps you create more accurate budgets for the future. When you can clearly see seasonal volume shifts, the average cost per package, and the impact of accessorial fees over time, your financial planning becomes much more precise. This data-driven approach to budgeting helps you avoid unexpected overages and gives your finance team greater confidence in their forecasts, making shipping a manageable expense rather than a volatile variable.
Portal Access and Pricing
We believe in the power of our platform, and we want you to see it for yourself without any upfront commitment. Getting started is designed to be a straightforward and risk-free process.
30-Day Free Trial
You can test the Spend Management Portal for 30 days without paying anything. This isn’t a limited demo; it’s a full-featured trial that allows you to connect your own shipping data and see the insights and savings opportunities unique to your business. It’s the best way to understand the value our technology can bring to your operations. We’re confident that once you see your shipping data transformed into actionable intelligence, you’ll understand the impact it can have on your bottom line.
The Shipware Difference: Proven Results and Expertise
Technology is a powerful tool, but it’s most effective when guided by deep industry knowledge. At Shipware, we combine our advanced software platform with a team of seasoned experts who have spent their careers inside the logistics industry. This blend of cutting-edge tech and human intelligence is what sets us apart. We don’t just give you data; we provide the context and guidance needed to turn that data into maximum savings and efficiency for your business.
Over a Decade of Industry Experience
Our team’s expertise is our greatest asset. Some key members of Shipware’s staff used to be carrier executives, and they negotiated agreements on behalf of the carriers. Combined, our staff has more than 200 collective years of this type of pricing expertise. This insider perspective is invaluable when it comes to carrier contract optimization. We understand the nuances of carrier pricing, the available discounts you may not know about, and the right way to structure a negotiation to achieve the best possible terms for your shipping profile.
Delivering Average Savings of 21.5%
Our approach delivers tangible results. On average, businesses that work with Shipware save 21.5% on their shipping costs each year. This figure represents the real-world impact of our combined technology and expertise. It’s a testament to the effectiveness of our invoice audits, contract negotiations, and spend management intelligence. For high-volume shippers, these savings can translate into millions of dollars that go directly back to the bottom line, funding growth and other critical business initiatives.
Our Commitment to Your Data Privacy
We understand that your shipping data is sensitive and that trusting a partner with it is a significant decision. Protecting your information is a responsibility we take very seriously. Shipware collects some basic information about website visitors (like browser type) and more personal information (like email addresses) when users sign up, request a demo, or log in. This information is used solely to provide and improve our services. Our entire business is built on a foundation of trust, and we are committed to maintaining the confidentiality and security of the data you entrust to us.
Ready to Take Control of Your Shipping Costs?
Shippers are at a lot of disadvantages when it comes to working with carriers. The shippers are often the little guys trying to gain some fairness when negotiating with the big carriers. Without numbers and intimate knowledge of what’s available in contract pricing and terms, the little guys will not be treated equally. That’s where benchmarking data and expertise come in. Shipware has both – with $2 billion in shipping spend locked away in our databases, ready for consultation. Our experts come from executive positions in the 3PL and carrier side, giving a unique view into negotiating strategies that will easily result in savings. And Shipware has the cloud-based technology providing visibility – line by line – into what parts of the carrier agreement weren’t met. That results in refunds and savings, that is not easy to collect without a solid plan in place. That plan should not include a human going through each invoice with magnifying glass. That isn’t going to cut it. What’s needed is a finely tuned software program that not only identifies each savings opportunity, but resolves it by sending off claims each day. Shipper should not get locked into a bad contract. When working with a company like Shipware, if the savings aren’t there, you don’t pay. Shipware proves its value, to the tune of 10-30% customer savings on average. That’s why one company told Shipware that the reporting tools highlighted inefficiencies on their end, and enabled them to improve delivery methods and rates, saving them $35,000 off the bat. Curious companies can start with rates negotiation services, or they can start with audits, but a comprehensive system-wide approach to evaluate and monitor shipping costs makes financial sense.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much work is required from my team to get started? Getting set up is surprisingly simple and designed to minimize the effort on your end. For the invoice audit service, you just need to provide one-time access to your carrier billing accounts. From there, our software and team handle everything automatically, from finding errors to filing claims. Your team doesn’t have to do anything else, but they will get to see the credits appear directly on your carrier invoices.
We already have a strong negotiator on our team. Why do we need help with our carrier contract? Even the best negotiators can only work with the information they have. The challenge with carrier contracts is that they are confidential, so you can’t compare your rates with other companies. Our team includes former carrier executives who have built these pricing models from the inside. We use a database of over $2 billion in shipping spend to benchmark your specific profile against the best-in-class rates, giving your negotiator the precise data needed to secure terms you might not have known were possible.
How does Shipware get paid for its services? Our model is built on a shared-savings principle, which means we only succeed when you do. For services like contract optimization and invoice auditing, our fees are a percentage of the actual savings we generate for you. There are no upfront costs or monthly retainers. This approach ensures our goals are perfectly aligned with yours: to save you as much money as possible.
What’s the difference between invoice auditing and contract optimization? Think of it this way: contract optimization is proactive, and invoice auditing is reactive. Contract optimization focuses on negotiating the best possible rates and terms before you ship, setting you up for long-term savings. Invoice auditing happens after you’ve shipped, ensuring you’re billed correctly according to that contract and recovering money for service failures like late deliveries. They work together perfectly to both lower your base costs and protect you from overcharges.
How can I see the savings and data you’re talking about? We provide all our invoice audit and Parcel Pay clients with complimentary access to our Spend Management Portal. This is your window into your entire shipping operation. You can build custom dashboards to track key metrics, see the refunds we’ve secured, and even model the financial impact of potential changes to your shipping strategy. We also offer a 30-day free trial of the portal so you can connect your own data and see the insights for yourself.
Key Takeaways
- Level the playing field in negotiations: Use benchmarking data and insider expertise to gain the leverage needed to secure the best possible carrier rates and contract terms, closing the information gap between you and the carriers.
- Stop leaving money on the table: An automated invoice audit system finds billing errors and service failures, then files for refunds on your behalf, recovering money you’re owed without creating extra work for your team.
- Make proactive decisions with your data: A business intelligence portal provides full visibility into your shipping operations, allowing you to model cost-saving scenarios, accurately predict the impact of rate increases, and create more precise budgets.