Shipping is more than hidden costs and boxes on doorsteps. It’s the last impression you leave on a customer. If delivery is late, the box is damaged, or it’s the wrong order, that’s what they’ll remember. No wonder 84% of consumers say delivery is the part of online shopping with which they are most dissatisfied.
Manual Data Entry Is Bleeding Your Team Dry
If a team member has to manually enter or copy-paste information from one system to another, labor hours are added to each order. Over time, this is literally time and money down the drain. These errors are often compounded by the number of carriers you use. Each carrier has its own portal and interface, so you may struggle with input errors simply because there are so many complicated, hard-to-use systems to navigate.
The larger a shipper you become, the more carriers you use. This means even more portals, and even more manually entered or copied-and-pasted errors. It’s a vicious cycle that ramps up as the company grows bigger.
You’re Drowning In “Where Is My Order” Calls
WISMO or Where Is My Order is the easiest type of customer service volume to minimize. Your customers call in after they didn’t receive proactive tracking, or you invite a predictable percentage of your order recipients to call your agents to get an update.
To capture the hidden costs of last-mile delivery without visibility, consider that every call your support team answers about order status subsidizes the calls they wouldn’t have received if the customer knew where the delivery was. They’re also your smallest orders, because the big ones already have someone calling to ask where the delivery is: the account manager.
Once you’ve got a view of the costs, benefits, and payoff period, we see companies choose to live with the problem quite often.
You’re Not Comparing Carrier Rates Before Every Shipment
If you don’t automatically fetch multi-carrier rates when the order is made, you’ll be charged a higher rate. This could be the standard rate, the one your team manually checked, or the rate of the carrier you’ve always employed.
Comparing rates from various carriers for every shipment can result in considerable savings on freight. When businesses implement transportation systems, their average spending on freight falls by 7.5% (Aberdeen Group). With thousands of shipments annually, this adds up to substantial savings.
LTL shipments, in particular, benefit. Carrier pooling and space optimization can reduce unit expenses, provided your system can examine alternatives in real-time, rather than simply opting for the default carrier. Switching from spreadsheets and carrier websites to a modern TMS transport management software helps businesses automate carrier selection, ensure the application of a constant rate, and centralize dispatching – removing the guesswork that makes freight a cost center instead of a managed expense.
Your System Can’t Handle Peak Volume Without Breaking
Almost every business has a version of a busy season – whether that be retail holidays, a product launch, a promotional window, or a quarterly contract flush. Shipping operations migrate from what they are designed for – average daily volume.
When that order count jumps for peak days or peak weeks, if your logistics system stays rigid, you get warehouse backlogs. Backlogged shipments miss the truck. Missed trucks miss delivery windows and that’s churn – right when you are spending the most dollars to acquire a new customer.
Route optimization is a great idea until it’s done in Excel. Carriers get over-requested. Staff get over-requested. Those day two orders that should have resulted in a 2nd order from a 1st-time buyer arrive a day late or with no tracking number or with the wrong item because the new hire transferring data missed the 7 in the SKU and overbooked SKU1.
Scalable logistics infrastructure isn’t about having more people on standby. It’s about having systems that expand without adding proportional overhead.
Your Freight Data Lives In Five Different Places
When carrier performance data, delivery times, and order fulfillment rates are recorded separately, it is impossible for anyone to have a complete view of these occurrences. This leads to a number of issues, as it is impossible to compare carrier performance data with freight cost data and on-time delivery rates.
This prevents you from determining where service level agreements are being violated, for instance, or where you are consistently overpaying. Without consolidated data, comparing what carriers actually charge against what was quoted for them can’t be done. Overcharges go undetected, and underperforming carriers continue to be used.
API integration works as a bridge between your shipping system and your ERP to prevent these leaks. In other words, if you really want to run your shipping department as a profit center rather than a cost center, you need to know what a well-run department looks like in all the data, and that starts with API integration.
