The Best Sendflex Alternative to Cut Ship Costs

Let’s talk about the number one fear holding shippers back from diversification: losing their primary carrier volume discounts. It’s a valid concern. Carriers structure their agreements to reward loyalty, and the thought of dropping to a lower discount tier is daunting. However, this fear is often based on an incomplete picture. The savings gained from routing even a small portion of your volume to a more cost-effective carrier can far outweigh any minor discount reduction. The key is a data-driven approach. This article shows you how to combine expert negotiation with a smart TMS, making the search for a Sendflex alternative secondary to building a holistic strategy that protects your bottom line.

Shipware and Sendflex Remove Parcel Carrier Diversification Risks by Shipware & Sendflex More and more shippers are beginning to see the light when it comes to carrier diversification. A multi-carrier shipping approach offers many benefits to brands, from small-volume to enterprise-level parcel shippers, including cost reduction, risk mitigation, time-in-transit, and service improvements. So, why do some brands still single-source? We’ve seen a broad range of reasons, from a sense of loyalty (“I’ve shipped Carrier A for 25 years.”) to anecdotal bias (“Carrier B always delivers my package to the wrong address; I just don’t like them.) However, both in our experience and according to a recent Pitney Bowes multicarrier survey, there are three primary obstacles to carrier diversification that shippers struggle to overcome:

1. They are afraid of losing their primary carrier volume discounts
2. They don’t have the time to engage new carriers and their incumbent carrier in a lengthy RFP and negotiation process
3. They don’t have the proper technology to support multicarrier fulfillment options

This article examines how Shipware and Sendflex provide the expertise and technology to overcome these obstacles.

The True Value of a Multi-Carrier Approach

Relying on a single shipping carrier is like putting all your operational eggs in one basket. While it might seem simpler, it exposes your business to unnecessary risks and costs. Embracing a multi-carrier shipping strategy is one of the most effective ways to build a more resilient, cost-effective, and efficient supply chain. As experts in the shipping industry have noted, “A multi-carrier shipping approach offers many benefits to brands, from small-volume to enterprise-level parcel shippers, including cost reduction, risk mitigation, time-in-transit, and service improvements.” By working with a diverse portfolio of national, regional, and specialized carriers, you can match the right service to the right shipment every single time, ensuring you’re not overpaying for services you don’t need or missing out on better performance.

Significant Cost Reduction and Service Improvements

No single carrier is the best at everything. One might offer unbeatable rates for cross-country ground shipping, while another excels at next-day deliveries within a specific region. A multi-carrier strategy allows you to leverage these individual strengths. Instead of being locked into one carrier’s rate card for all your shipments, you can shop for the best rate and service level for each package. This practice, known as carrier diversification, introduces competition that directly benefits your bottom line. It’s not just about finding the lowest price; it’s about optimizing for value. This could mean choosing a regional carrier that can deliver a package in two days for the price of a national carrier’s three-day service, improving your customer experience while managing costs effectively.

Mitigating Supply Chain Risk

Recent years have shown us just how quickly supply chains can be disrupted. Carrier strikes, weather events, natural disasters, and unexpected capacity crunches can bring a single-carrier operation to a grinding halt. When your entire fulfillment process depends on one provider, any issue they face becomes your issue, leading to shipping delays, unhappy customers, and potential revenue loss. Diversifying your carrier base is a powerful risk mitigation tactic. If your primary carrier is experiencing delays in a certain region, you can pivot your volume to a secondary provider without missing a beat. This flexibility creates a more resilient supply chain that can adapt to unforeseen challenges, protecting your brand’s reputation and ensuring business continuity when it matters most.

The Strategic Advantage of Parcel Consolidation

For businesses that frequently send multiple packages to the same destination, such as a distribution center, retail store, or large customer, parcel consolidation offers a significant strategic advantage. Instead of shipping dozens of individual boxes, you can group them onto a single pallet and ship them as one Less-Than-Truckload (LTL) freight shipment. This approach to modal optimization can lead to substantial savings, as “combining packages into LTL shipments is often cheaper per pound and avoids many extra fees that individual parcels have.” By shifting modes, you move from paying per-package minimums and surcharges to a single, often lower, freight charge, directly impacting your shipping spend.

Reduce Product Damage in Transit

Every time an individual parcel is handled—sorted at a hub, loaded onto a truck, or moved by a driver—there’s a risk of it being dropped, crushed, or damaged. When you consolidate these parcels into a single, secure LTL shipment, you dramatically reduce the number of touchpoints. As logistics experts point out, “When packages are combined into one larger shipment, they are handled less often. This means there’s less chance of them getting damaged.” This reduction in handling directly translates to lower rates of product damage, which means fewer costly returns, replacements, and customer service headaches for your team.

Achieve Faster Delivery Times

While it might seem like sending individual parcels would be faster, consolidation can often streamline the delivery process. Instead of multiple packages moving independently through a carrier’s complex hub-and-spoke system, a single LTL shipment can travel a more direct route from your facility to the final destination. This can help bypass potential bottlenecks at major sorting hubs, especially during peak season. By moving your goods in a more direct and consolidated manner, you can sometimes achieve more predictable and even faster overall transit times, getting your products where they need to be with greater efficiency.

Lower Your Carbon Footprint

In addition to the financial and operational benefits, parcel consolidation is also a greener way to ship. A fully loaded truck is far more efficient than multiple, partially empty delivery vans making the same journey. As noted in a recent analysis, “Fewer, larger shipments mean fewer trucks on the road, which saves fuel and reduces pollution.” For companies focused on sustainability and reducing their environmental impact, adopting a consolidation strategy is a tangible step toward achieving those goals. It’s a smart business decision that aligns your operational efficiency with corporate responsibility, creating a win-win for your budget and the planet.

Overcoming Common Obstacles to Diversification

While the benefits are clear, many shippers hesitate to adopt a multi-carrier strategy because of a few common, and understandable, hurdles. The good news is that with the right approach and expertise, these obstacles are entirely surmountable. The three primary concerns we hear most often are the fear of losing volume discounts, the lack of time for a complex negotiation process, and not having the right technology to manage it all. Let’s break down how to address each of these. By tackling these challenges head-on, you can build a shipping strategy that is both diverse and manageable, giving you a true competitive edge.

First, many shippers worry that splitting their volume will cause them to lose the hard-won discounts they have with their primary carrier. While this is a valid concern, it often oversimplifies the financial equation. The savings gained by routing specific shipments to a more cost-effective regional or specialized carrier can far outweigh any minor reduction in your primary carrier’s discount tier. The key is a data-driven approach. Through expert contract optimization and benchmarking, you can negotiate favorable terms with multiple carriers simultaneously, ensuring your rates are competitive across the board. It’s not about abandoning your primary carrier; it’s about supplementing them intelligently to lower your total net shipping costs.

The second major hurdle is time. The thought of engaging new carriers in a lengthy RFP and negotiation process is daunting for already-strapped logistics teams. This is where a strategic partner can be invaluable. Instead of dedicating internal resources to months of research, data analysis, and back-and-forth negotiations, you can leverage a team of experts who live and breathe carrier contracts. They can manage the entire process for you, using industry insights and proprietary data to secure best-in-class rates and terms. This allows your team to stay focused on core operations while still achieving a fully optimized, multi-carrier network that can significantly reduce high-volume shipping costs.

Finally, there’s the technology piece. Managing rates, labels, and tracking across multiple carrier portals is inefficient and prone to error. A successful multi-carrier strategy requires technology that can automate rate shopping and provide centralized visibility. While implementing a new Transportation Management System (TMS) can seem like a big lift, modern platforms are more accessible than ever. Furthermore, a robust spend management portal can provide the critical reporting and analytics needed to monitor carrier performance and ensure your diversification strategy is delivering the expected ROI. By combining the right technology with expert guidance, you can overcome these common obstacles and build a truly resilient and cost-effective shipping operation.

Risk of losing volume discounts

In general, carriers want most or all of your volume. Sure, there are some exceptions, like large and heavy packages (“ugly shipments”), which carriers will dissuade you from injecting into their parcel networks by levying hefty fees and surcharges, but for the most part, carriers want the bulk of your business.  They also want predictable volumes so they can optimize their network planning. That’s where volume discounts (also known as Earned Discounts, Portfolio Tiers, Tier Incentives, and Revenue Bands) come into play. The more volume you ship with a carrier, the greater the discount on each shipment. For example, if your annualized transportation spend over a rolling 52-week period falls between $3,500,000.00 and $3,999,999.99, you may receive a 14% discount on Ground Domestic shipping. If you ship more volume and fall between $4,000,000.00 and $4,999,999.99, you may receive a 15% discount. Fall below $3,500,000.00 into the lower tier and your discount may drop to 13%. The discount tiers paint a clear picture. Save money by shipping more with us. Lose money by shipping less. Shippers’ concerns with losing volume discounts are typically based on a simplified understanding of how carrier discount tiers work. The reality is, in comparison to the benefits of multicarrier shipping, most shippers receive negligible rewards or penalties for moving up or down discount tiers, respectively. Carrier agreements contain a number of discount tiers, often seven, sometimes more, sometimes less. Typically, at the time of signing, most shippers fall into a discount tier at the middle of the tier table, where moving up or down a tier results in a 0.1% to 1.0% increase or decrease in service discounts. As they approach the outer ranges of volume/revenue tiers, they’ll find a tier with a slightly larger cliff. You’ll likely find the same in your own agreement(s). For example, here’s how a FedEx Earned Discount table for Home Delivery Single Piece may be structured:

  Here’s how a UPS discount tier for Ground Residential based on weekly transportation charges may be structured:

  Note that outside of the 0% tier, most tiers reflect a 0.2% to 1.0% change in discounts. Shippers with tiers structured like this can divert 10% to 20% of their volume while only losing 1% or 2% of their service discount. Most shippers don’t approach the tier with the larger (4% in the examples above) discount cliff and only do so in the case of rapid business growth or rapid decline. In those cases, discount tiers become somewhat moot, as the shipper should focus on a complete renegotiation of the carrier agreement to right-size their pricing and discount tiers to minimize losses. Third-party negotiators like Shipware help businesses leverage their growth and increased volume to renegotiate agreements that result in discounts larger than those received by moving up revenue tiers, even to the highest tier. On the flip side, Shipware helps businesses mitigate higher service rates that come from declining volume. But, back to the question of losing volume discounts when adding more carriers: yes, you may lose some percentage of discount when shifting volume to a new carrier, depending on how much volume. However, discount incentives for shifting volume to a new carrier often outweigh the discount penalties from the incumbent carrier. The gains can supersede the losses. Carrier reps are incentivized to win new customers and volume from competing carriers. Shipware’s consulting team, consisting of former carrier pricing management and executives, leverages detailed insider knowledge of carrier rep incentives, pricing models, and benchmarks to further maximize incentives for diversifying volume. In addition, diversifying even a small portion of volume to other carriers engages that carrier and begins the relationship-building process, which strengthens negotiating positions long-term and protects against service failures. Remember the summer of 2023 when the UPS Teamsters came alarmingly close to a work stoppage? FedEx threatened to turn away UPS customers who were scrambling to ensure their packages would get delivered in the event of a strike. However, existing FedEx customers were assured their volume would be prioritized if network capacity became an issue. Primarily-UPS shippers that had even a small amount of existing volume with FedEx would have been “safe.” Sacrificing a discount tier or two to shift volume to another carrier can not only result in overall cost reductions, but service improvements as well. When Shipware works with brands on diversifying, we’re often able to attain discounts on express services the brand previously thought weren’t possible. Those discounts can activate faster shipping options through the new carrier, leading to better delivery times and improved sales. However, to uncover these opportunities, shippers need to be open to engaging new carriers. Brands can open discussions with carriers themselves to discover surface-level opportunities, but leveraging a pricing consult with specific expertise on carrier agreements and pricing models will unearth deeper discounts and strategic opportunities. Some shippers have a problem with one of their SKUs taking damage at a higher-than-normal rate. Occasionally, there’s just something about the network that isn’t compatible with their product and/or packaging in a certain region. Those shippers may find that shifting that volume to a regional carrier results in fewer damaged claims, fewer returns, and improved costs. Working with a consultant like Shipware will help you navigate diversification and loss of volume discounts by supporting negotiations with all carriers, including your incumbent, to ensure a balance that results in maximized cost reductions and service improvements. Working with a parcel TMS provider like Sendflex will help you operationalize and enforce data-driven carrier selection rules during the order to fulfillment process to ensure you satisfy primary carrier contract incentives and only then take advantage of alternate carrier services.   Optimizing intelligent decisions takes the fear out of losing incentives. A parcel consultant can also help you circumvent minimum commitment clauses, wherein a carrier requires shippers to commit a percentage of their volume or a fixed annual spend to them, and growth clauses, through which a carrier can modify pricing or change the shipment service if their customer grows too much.  

Don’t have the time/bandwidth to diversify

Negotiating with carriers is a lengthy process. It can take months to fully optimize an agreement, not to mention with multiple carriers. There are multiple RFPs, multiple bid rounds, financial impact analyses after receiving each bid, and large amounts of correspondence with the carrier rep (who then must correspond with their pricing team), all multiplied by the number of carriers engaged. Skipping steps and rushing a signature can result in massive overspending. We encounter rushed carrier agreements all the time with rates that benchmark at 20% to 30% above optimized rates. So, what to do? Some businesses hire logistics professionals, often with carrier-side experience, specifically for the purpose of negotiating with carriers and proactively managing rates. If that’s not an option (and for most it’s not), working with a third-party negotiator like Shipware, which has negotiated thousands of contracts using proven, tried and true strategies, will free up your team while significantly shortening procurement time. Many consultants offer their RFP and negotiation services with no upfront costs, instead paying themselves with a portion of savings generated, meaning guaranteed cost reductions. If you want to dip your toes into carrier diversification yourself but don’t have time for a lengthy procurement process and are also concerned with losing volume discounts, you can opt for the “Avoidance Option.” This involves siphoning off any growth in package volume to a new carrier. You engage a new carrier, enhancing your position for future rate negotiations, and sidestep the issue of potentially dropping a discount tier with your incumbent carrier. Just make sure your current carrier agreement doesn’t contain an aforementioned percentage-based minimum commitment clause. Working with a parcel TMS provider like Sendflex will enable you to simulate the impact new carrier rates and diversification will have on your shipping costs and delivery performance.  Using Sendflex’s simulator, you can load historical shipping data and compare the old rates with the carrier’s new proposed rates.  Shippers often find that the proposed rates are higher than a carrier’s published GRI estimates.  You can also run “what if” scenarios to compare cost and delivery performance with alternative carrier services in conjunction with the new rate structures. So while rate negotiation and diversification may be time consuming, using Sendflex simulation tools can be a fast way of providing an objective analysis for thoughtful decision making.  

Don’t have the proper technology to implement multi-carrier strategies.

With the growth of eCommerce and competitive pressure from Amazon, shippers are implementing omni-channel fulfillment strategies which, together with more complicated rate structures and carrier diversification, are making decisions about when, where, and how to ship parcels more challenging than ever.  Especially when shippers are trying to accurately determine costs to control margins during digital storefront, order allocation, and fulfillment processes. And eCommerce currently accounts for less than 20% of all retail purchases, so the challenges are only beginning. Unfortunately, most OMS, WMS, and shipping systems were never designed to deal with today’s complex parcel fulfillment requirements.  They didn’t have to.  For decades, parcel shipment planning amounted to: “I plan to ship all my packages by UPS (or FedEx)”.  Tribal knowledge and rules of thumb determined parcel cost calculations when the impact on margins were not as severe. There is a reason why shippers have concerns about whether their current technology can support more sophisticated carrier rate selection decisions.  It’s because legacy shipping systems require costly and time-consuming custom programming which are difficult to support, maintain, or change. Sendflex is a next generation parcel TMS platform that makes it easy for business users to easily configure complex business rules which can be applied during order to ship processes.   Non-programmers can accomplish in minutes using Sendflex what would otherwise take weeks of hard coding to achieve. As it relates to carrier diversification, Sendflex monitors carrier spending levels and volumes in real time.  Business users can configure business rules to only consider alternative carriers when primary carrier spending levels or volumes are on track to meet discount targets.  These instructions can be applied upstream from shipping or at point of shipping. Best of all, Sendflex’s optimization engine includes an API that can work in conjunction with incumbent shipping systems so there is no need to rip and replace existing processes.

Conclusion

By engaging parcel shipping experts like Shipware and implementing a parcel TMS platform like Sendflex to operationalize controls, Shippers can reap all the benefits of a multi-carrier solution. For more information, contact us here.

Choosing the Right Technology: Not All Shipping Platforms Are Equal

Once you’ve decided to pursue a multi-carrier strategy, the next question is a big one: how do you actually manage it? The right technology is the bridge between your strategy and successful execution. Without it, you’re left with manual processes, spreadsheets, and guesswork—all of which eat up time and lead to costly errors. The goal is to automate carrier selection based on a set of rules that align with your business goals, whether that’s cost, speed, or meeting volume commitments. But not all platforms are created equal, and choosing the wrong one can be just as damaging as having no system at all.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the options, which range from simple consumer-grade tools to sophisticated enterprise-level systems. For a high-volume business, making the wrong choice isn’t just an inconvenience; it introduces significant financial and operational risk. It’s critical to understand the different types of platforms available and to distinguish between tools designed for individual shoppers and those built for the complexities of a commercial shipping operation. Let’s break down the landscape to clarify what you should look for and, just as importantly, what you should avoid.

A Word of Caution on Consumer Package Forwarding Services

When you first search for shipping solutions, you might come across package forwarding services. It’s important to immediately recognize these for what they are: tools designed for individual consumers, not businesses. These services provide a domestic address (like one in the U.S.) for international shoppers to use when buying from online stores that don’t ship to their home country. The service receives the package and then forwards it to the customer’s actual address abroad. While this model works for a one-off purchase, it is fundamentally unsuited for the scale, security, and complexity of a business’s fulfillment needs.

For a business, relying on this type of service would be a logistical nightmare. They lack the integration capabilities, reporting features, and robust support that companies require. More importantly, they introduce a level of risk that is simply unacceptable for commercial operations. As one online discussion notes, “It’s very hard to find reliable package forwarding services,” with many appearing untrustworthy. For businesses managing thousands of shipments, entrusting inventory to a platform with a questionable reputation for reliability and security is a gamble you can’t afford to take.

How Package Forwarding Works for Individuals

The concept behind package forwarding is straightforward for its intended user: the individual cross-border shopper. According to forwarding service Opas, the process involves a customer signing up to receive a U.S.-based address. They use this address at checkout when shopping from U.S. retailers. The forwarding company receives the packages at their warehouse, consolidates them if requested, and then ships the final parcel to the customer’s international address. This solves a simple problem for a person who wants to buy a product from a store that doesn’t offer international shipping. It’s a transactional, one-to-one solution that fills a specific niche in the consumer market.

The Inherent Risks for High-Value Shipments

The risks associated with consumer-grade forwarding services become glaringly obvious when you consider the value and volume of business shipments. These platforms are simply not built with the security protocols necessary to protect commercial inventory. Online forums are filled with horror stories. Users on Reddit describe some services as being “known for screwing customers,” and there are even claims from alleged former employees that stealing packages was a common issue. When you’re shipping hundreds or thousands of orders, the potential for lost inventory, theft, and poor customer support makes these services a non-starter. A professional shipping operation requires a secure, accountable, and transparent technology partner to reduce distribution and fulfillment costs, not add to them through loss and damage.

Navigating the Logistics Software Market

Moving away from consumer-grade tools, the professional logistics software market offers solutions designed to handle the complexities of business shipping. These platforms are built to integrate with your existing systems (like an OMS or WMS), provide detailed analytics, and execute complex shipping logic automatically. However, this category is also broad, containing different types of software with distinct functions. Understanding the key differences is essential to finding a solution that truly supports a dynamic multi-carrier strategy. The two main categories you’ll encounter are courier management software and more advanced Parcel Transportation Management Systems (TMS).

Your choice will depend on the sophistication of your needs. Are you simply looking to manage a few local couriers, or are you trying to optimize a national fulfillment network across multiple carriers with complex contracts? A basic system might help you print labels for different carriers, but a true Parcel TMS will empower you to make intelligent, data-driven decisions on every single package that leaves your warehouse, ensuring you hit both your cost and service targets without manual intervention.

Courier Management Software

Courier management software is typically focused on managing on-demand or last-mile deliveries. Think of platforms that help local businesses coordinate their own fleet of drivers or connect with local courier services. According to software comparison site Technology Counter, these tools offer features for dispatching, tracking, and proof of delivery. While useful for restaurants, florists, or businesses with a local delivery component, this type of software generally lacks the capabilities needed for a national or international parcel shipping strategy. It isn’t designed to analyze complex carrier rate tables, accessorial fees, or time-in-transit data from major carriers like FedEx and UPS.

Parcel Transportation Management Systems (TMS)

A Parcel Transportation Management System (TMS) is the brain of a modern shipping operation. Unlike simpler systems, a Parcel TMS is designed to handle the immense complexity of multi-carrier parcel shipping. It connects directly to your order and warehouse systems to make automated, optimized shipping decisions in real-time. As we’ve noted, a platform like Sendflex allows you to load historical shipping data and run “what if” scenarios to simulate the financial impact of new carrier rates or diversification strategies. This is crucial for validating a carrier’s proposal against their published GRI estimates and ensuring you’re making the most cost-effective choice for every shipment, every time. A robust TMS provides the spend management portal and analytics needed to maintain control over a diversified carrier network.

The Complete Solution for Multi-Carrier Success

True multi-carrier success isn’t achieved by just flipping a switch on a new piece of software. Technology is a powerful enabler, but it’s most effective when paired with an intelligent strategy. The most sophisticated Parcel TMS in the world can only execute the rules you give it. If those rules are based on suboptimal carrier contracts, you’re simply automating inefficiency. The ideal solution, therefore, is a two-part approach: expert-led strategy and negotiation combined with intelligent, tech-driven execution. This ensures you have the best possible rates and rules loaded into a system capable of applying them flawlessly across your entire fulfillment operation.

This combination allows you to overcome the primary obstacles to diversification—fear of losing discounts, lack of time, and inadequate technology. The strategy component addresses your contract concerns and frees up your team’s bandwidth, while the technology component provides the engine for execution. By bringing together human expertise and powerful software, you create a resilient, cost-effective shipping ecosystem that can adapt to market changes, mitigate risks, and consistently deliver for your customers. It’s about making your shipping operation a strategic asset rather than just a cost center.

Expert Strategy and Negotiation with Shipware

This is where the human element comes in. Before you can optimize your shipping with technology, you need to ensure you have the best possible carrier contracts in place. Negotiating with carriers is a specialized skill, and that’s where a partner like Shipware becomes invaluable. Our team, composed of former carrier-side executives, understands the pricing models, discount structures, and negotiation levers inside and out. We handle the entire time-consuming RFP and negotiation process for you. As we’ve stated, working with a consultant helps you navigate diversification and the potential loss of volume discounts by supporting negotiations with all carriers to maximize cost reductions and service improvements. We ensure your contracts are optimized before they ever get loaded into a TMS.

Intelligent Execution with the Sendflex Platform

Once Shipware has secured best-in-class contracts, the Sendflex platform provides the intelligent execution engine. Sendflex is a next-generation Parcel TMS that makes it easy for your business team—not just programmers—to configure complex business rules. For example, you can set rules to ensure you meet your primary carrier’s volume commitments before routing packages to alternate carriers. The platform’s optimization engine can work with your existing shipping systems, so there’s no need to rip and replace what you already have. This powerful combination of strategy and technology allows you to fully operationalize your carrier diversification strategy, removing the risks and guesswork while unlocking significant savings and service enhancements.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will I really lose my volume discounts if I start using more than one carrier? This is the number one concern we hear, and it’s a valid question. While it’s possible your discount tier with your primary carrier could shift, the financial impact is often much smaller than you’d think. Most carrier agreements are structured so that moving down one tier only results in a minor discount change, maybe one percent or less. The savings you can gain by routing even 10-20% of your packages to a more cost-effective regional or specialized carrier almost always outweighs that small dip. It’s about lowering your total net cost, not just protecting one specific discount.

My team is already stretched thin. How can we find the time to negotiate with multiple new carriers? You don’t have to find the time, because you shouldn’t be doing it alone. Negotiating a single carrier contract is a months-long process, let alone several at once. Instead of pulling your team away from their core responsibilities, you can partner with experts who do this all day, every day. A team like Shipware can manage the entire procurement process for you, leveraging data and insider knowledge to secure best-in-class rates much faster than a company could on its own.

Our current shipping software is pretty basic. Do I need to be a tech expert to manage a multi-carrier strategy? Not anymore. While older systems required custom coding and IT support, modern Parcel Transportation Management Systems (TMS) are built for business users. Platforms like Sendflex allow you to configure complex shipping rules using simple logic, without writing a single line of code. For instance, you can set a rule to meet your primary carrier’s volume commitment first, then automatically rate shop all other packages for the best cost or transit time. These systems work with your existing software, making the transition smooth.

What’s the real risk of using a cheaper online package forwarding service for my business? Package forwarding services are designed for individual consumers, not for the scale and complexity of a business. The risks are significant: they lack the security protocols to protect valuable commercial inventory, offer little to no accountability for lost or damaged goods, and don’t provide the reporting or integration capabilities you need. Relying on them for business fulfillment introduces a level of financial and operational risk that simply isn’t worth it.

How do contract negotiation and a shipping platform work together? They are two essential parts of a complete solution. Think of it this way: expert negotiation with a partner like Shipware gets you the best possible rates and terms from your carriers. That’s your strategy. Then, an intelligent platform like Sendflex takes those optimized contracts and executes that strategy flawlessly on every single shipment. The platform automates the decision-making process to ensure you’re always using the right service at the right price. One without the other leaves you with either a great plan you can’t execute efficiently or a great tool that’s automating a costly, unoptimized strategy.

Key Takeaways

• Look beyond your primary carrier’s discounts: The fear of dropping a discount tier often prevents shippers from diversifying; however, the savings from routing even a portion of your volume to a more competitive carrier can easily outweigh a minor discount adjustment.
• Pair expert strategy with smart technology: The best shipping software can only automate the rules you give it, so start by having experts negotiate best-in-class carrier contracts, then use a Parcel TMS to apply those optimized rates and rules to every shipment.
• Implement technology built for business complexity: A successful multi-carrier strategy requires a professional Parcel Transportation Management System (TMS), which is designed to handle complex rate shopping, monitor volume commitments, and automate decisions to meet your cost and service goals.