Who likes to make mistakes? Pretty much no one, right?
And is there any more maddening mistake than one that costs you money? Yes, there is – one that costs your employer money.
No one wants to be the one who wastes company funds. (That could be the difference between an awesome company holiday party and a super lame one!) But if you’re in charge of managing your company’s shipping costs, you might be doing just that.
The devil is in the details
We see a lot of innocent shipping mistakes being made every day. After all, the tangle of contracts, invoices, and surcharges can be so complex and frustrating that you might just throw up your hands in defeat and accept that what your carrier is charging you is correct.
Think about it – you know that monster CSV file you get from your shipper every month? How often do you sit down and carefully review it line by line? Depending on your carrier, a CSV file can have more than 250 data points to review. Who’s got time for that?
By just trusting that all the charges and fees in the file are what you accurate and appropriate, you could be leaving money on the table. Are you getting charged for overnight deliveries that didn’t happen? Did you get hit with surcharges that caused your costs to exceed your expected General Rate Increase? Your data will tell you a story that can improve your costs and your business, if only you take a minute to listen.
Weighing shipping costs and customer experience
Beware of the Amazon effect. Thanks to the granddaddy of online retailers, nobody likes waiting for their orders for very long these days – or paying for shipping. In a 2019 consumer survey, 72% of U.S. respondents said the choice of free shipping “greatly impacted” their ordering decision. This puts tremendous pressure on your company to ship efficiently while delighting the customer at the same time.
When and where should express shipping be used? How many distribution or fulfillment centers should you have and in what locations? How does your transit time compare to your competitors? These are important strategic and tactical questions every business in the shipping world should consider. But, again, without intimately understanding your data, you might be missing key operational issues.
Finding – and fixing – your shipping mistakes
These are just two of the issues that shippers often overlook. Our white paper, Five Big Shipping Mistakes Your Company is Likely Making, discusses the most common issues we see and helps find ways to avoid them in the future.
When you know everything you can about your shipping operations – mistakes and all – you’ll be in a better position to optimize with your carrier, make smarter operational decisions and help your company save money. Your bottom line – and your boss – will thank you.
Grab our white paper to find out about more shipping mistakes you might be making.
