As a shipper, you know costs can get out of hand quickly. But you might not realize just where all these costs are coming from — or what you can do to get them under control. Here are three areas you can focus on to look for savings and stop leaving money on the table.
Surcharges
Surcharges can account for 30 percent of your shipping invoices if you’re not careful. Shippers often miss the things they can do within their own operations to control surcharges.
Some are simple, like avoiding address correction surcharges by updating customer data in your CRM regularly. Or steering your customers toward shipping their orders to lockers or retail locations instead of their homes, helping you avoid residential delivery and delivery area surcharges.
Other fixes are more complex, like optimizing your distribution network, your product mix, your packaging, your cost of goods sold and your shipping policies. This is no easy feat, but with the right shipping software, you can understand your costs in these areas and determine how to improve.
Payment Penalties
You’ve got a lot of bills to pay each month, and you certainly don’t want to add late fees to your costs. But you also don’t want to pay too much by paying too soon either. Yes, it’s a thing. When you pay your carrier invoices, you lose your chance to get a refund on any mistaken charges. Making sure your invoices are correct before you pay and timing your payment correctly will keep you from paying more than you should.
Errors
So what about these errors you could be getting refunds for? Carriers handle millions of packages every day — there’s bound to be mistakes along the way. They might apply a surcharge incorrectly, measure your dimensional weight wrong or even just enter a good, old-fashioned typo. Whatever the cause, it’s up to you to make sure all the charges on your invoices are correct so you don’t pay what you don’t have to.
You might have noticed that putting a stop to unnecessary shipping costs can mean spending a lot of time digging through invoices, confirming charges, and making sure everything is correct before you pay. But who has time for that?
VeriShip can take all the headaches and hassle off your plate and make sure you’re only paying for what you should. See how we can help.
