Welcome to Parcelconsulting
Welcome to Parcelconsulting
Shipping is a complex process with dozens of moving parts, which most companies don’t realize until they dig into their shipping contracts. These dense documents contain details about all the different services, as well as pricing for package types and units of distance traveled. The basics alone are enough to make anyone’s head spin, and that’s before adding any accessorial fees or surcharges.
It’s no wonder why many companies hire shipping consultants to help them navigate the logistics landscape. The best shipping consulting companies work with you as partners and keep your interests in mind. They provide industry knowledge, effective guidance and plenty of manpower so you can deep dive into your data and use it to your advantage.
When you go looking for a third party shipping consulting service, you’ll see dozens of options. Here’s how to find the best of the best.
Most third party shipping consultants can offer you a few standard services:
What does this mean for you? It means that when you hire a shipping consultant, you’ll have your entire shipping process audited so you can maximize your spend and your efficiency.
Logistics consulting companies start with your spending reports and shipping carrier contract. The latter is likely full of provisions—price floors, surcharges and more—that are costing you more money than you realize. Using those insights and their familiarity with the nuances of contract negotiation, your consultants will then negotiate a more cost-friendly contract. This can save you upwards of 15% on your shipping, which you can instead allocate toward growing your business.
Shipping consultants are also masters at identifying carrier errors and possible refunds within a shipping invoice. For example, most regional carriers promise refunds on deliveries made late (3-5% of shipments in total) but fail to issue those refunds. Your consultants will hunt down those refunds, saving you thousands of dollars in the process.
The typical third party shipping consultants will only offer you these services and nothing more. While they’re certainly helpful, there are a few savings opportunities that set the best shipping consulting companies apart: better software, packaging analysis, utilization of regional and local carriers and more. When you work with the best companies, you take a more holistic approach to shipping, and this can improve your entire workflow.
It’s rare for companies shipping on a daily basis to have plug and play options to reduce their shipping costs, improve their pick and pack process, automate as much of the shipping label printing as possible, and make sure that it fits into their internal technology stack. That’s why the companies that do have these options always win. They take a holistic approach to shipping, which makes them more agile and more scalable, and they save big along the way.
After all, there are several advantages to understanding how software and carrier strategies can save you more money when combined. Let’s take a look at the single shipping carrier approach as an example. This approach is working for fewer businesses than ever before because carriers are becoming overloaded as ecommerce growth surges. If one carrier is experiencing delays, that affects your entire customer base because you have no backup carriers to complete your deliveries. You’re left with unhappy customers who choose to shop elsewhere in the future.
When you have shipping software and a multicarrier strategy, however, you never face that scenario. The software can identify which carriers are delivering on time for the lowest cost, so each order will arrive as expected. You’ll not only save on the initial shipping cost, but you’ll also increase your customer lifetime value because your deliveries meet their expectations.
As you can see, technology can make or break a shipping strategy. There are more shipping, inventory, and fulfillment software options than ever before, but few are up to snuff. Shipping technology consulting companies can help you weed out the duds so you can find the best solution for your business.
Bridging the gap between carriers, rates, technology, software, and optimal fulfillment process is where shipping consultants can add the most value to product-based companies. In essence, consultants help you identify the pieces of the shipping puzzle and then put it together.
Perhaps the best part of working with a team of experts is that your experience is totally personalized. Shipping software needs for a small business shipping one product from a single location are different from those of an enterprise selling millions of dollars of thousands of different products from a single location. And companies shipping from many different locations around the country and world have completely different needs for software. This is the reason many companies look to a shipping software consultant when they’re adding new logistics technology to their workflows.
Today’s consumers are inundated with on-demand offerings from streaming to rideshare to meal delivery, and it’s changing the way they look at ecommerce. Shipping consultants know this and are developing creative ways to rise to the challenge.
Finding ways to get your products to your customers faster and cheaper gives you a competitive edge. If you’re not sure about that, ask Amazon, Walmart and Target how they feel. Better yet, look at where they’ve invested billions of dollars. Amazon plans to open 1,000+ suburban parcel delivery stations for easier same-day or even 2-hour delivery. The announcement came as a response to Walmart and Target, which are also expanding their fulfillment networks to meet demand. Walmart in particular is undergoing a company restructuring to place more focus on the needs of each store’s local community. Target, on the other hand, went broader. The company bought on-demand delivery service Shipt and is now acquiring the technology that drives same-day delivery service Deliv.
If you don’t have billions of dollars to invest or even millions, you need to make sure you are not wasting your valuable and limited resources by overpaying for shipping or spending hours of extra time and labor more than necessary to get your packages shipped every day.
Parcel Consulting has aggregated and partnered with the best options for same-day, next-day local delivery in the United States and Canada. We work with businesses of all types and sizes to provide the best tailored local delivery options and technology for their needs.
We’ve been preparing for this for more than a decade and we’re here to help! Give us a ring to discuss your options at: 833-PARCEL-1 (833-727-2351).
