Multi-carrier shipping software: Features & Benefits

Multi-carrier shipping software (MCSS) helps retailers and e-commerce providers choose the most cost-effective and efficient carriers to deliver packages and parcels to their customers. Parcel shipping is a dynamic business and volume, costs, and routes can quickly change. Building adaptability and resilience into delivery networks allows companies to achieve superior delivery experiences for their customers. Choosing a robust multi-carrier shipping software to help organize and manage carrier selection is critical. 

It is software that allows retailers and e-commerce shippers to dynamically choose the best logistics carriers for their parcels based on a predetermined set of criteria including: destination, price, route, speed-of-delivery, package size and weight. This software helps companies automatically choose the best carrier from a pool of carriers, both regional and national in scope.

In the past, a company might work with one or two shipping carriers to deliver parcels to their customers. With today’s shipping volumes exploding and with shipping costs increasing, it’s important to have the ability to choose from and use multiple carriers to ensure agility and flexibility while controlling costs. When a shipper inputs a package size and weight along with the destination and delivery timeframe, MCSS compares carriers, rates and their service levels based on predetermined and preloaded criteria.

Worldwide, e-commerce sales are expected to reach $6 trillion by 2024.The process of delivering an increased volume of packages becomes increasingly more complex and costly for shippers. It’s a tough balancing act between the need for shippers to precisely optimize their end-to-end omnichannel fulfillment while also keeping their last-mile costs down. Achieving last-mile excellence also means providing flexible and frictionless order tracking and fulfillment. 

Shippers who choose to expand their carrier capacity and want to build an ecosystem of multiple carriers to fulfill demand will find that a whole new set of challenges arises with managing deliveries through multiple carriers. Multi-carrier shipping software is ideal for helping to manage these situations.  

Multi-carrier shipping software allows shippers to centralize and automate processes with their carriers. Using predetermined and preset criteria by the shipper, MCSS allows shippers to:

• Allocate the right orders to the right carriers.

• Ensure preset criteria are met depending on agreements made with carriers such as meeting minimum capacity requirements.

• Determine their costs for shipping based on preset criteria with various carriers.

• Offer flexibility to customers by offering different delivery speeds upon checkout.

Lower Delivery Costs

The software chooses the carrier with best price and lowest cost delivery options, meaning the shipper can always get the best price-per-package and be able to control their shipping costs without relying upon one carrier. 

Package Tracking and Exception Alerts

The ability to track packages precisely allows shippers to know if there are exceptions and to work to fix them prior to missing a deadline. Tracking also provides customers to know where their parcels and packages are, giving them a superior customer experience. 

Efficiency

Automating carrier decisions makes the process efficient. There is no second guessing or manual searching for the best rates as rates and routes are chosen based on pre-set criteria, making carrier selection easy, fast and efficient.

MCSS allows businesses to:

• Eliminate the manual operations of choosing carriers and calculating rates.

• Manage multiple carriers using one system.

• Standardize the criteria for carrier selection.

• Incorporate complex logic in a reduced timeframe.

• Improve cost-efficiency of shipping

Today’s consumers have many delivery options open to them including same-day, same-hour, curbside and free deliveries. Companies must offer multiple options to customers at the time of checkout because consumers expect it and keeping them happy helps foster brand loyalty. However,  offering all of these options also impacts the way deliveries are orchestrated. Companies need a way to seamlessly sync all of the delivery choices to carrier capacity planning. 

FarEye’s Ship product offers businesses a fulfilling and flexible range of delivery options. FarEye’s pre-built order management system integrations, expansive carrier networks and a large system of delivery service providers allows shippers flexibility in their deliveries. 

FarEye’s Ship easily lets retailers, e-commerce and logistics providers expand their carrier networks and allows shippers to introduce and manage new delivery options like curbside pick-up, scheduled, next-day or same-day delivery with ease. It also allows multi-carrier enabled deliveries for peak efficiency and on-time delivery performance, all based on selections customers make at checkout. 

Ship provides: 

• Dynamic allocation to the carriers with best pricing and shipping terms ensuring companies can choose the lowest cost delivery options.

• Comparison of rates and transit times from carriers simultaneously.

• Increased order processing speed and faster shipping times.

• Ability to accurately track packages & receive exception alerts to improve customer experience.

• Increased throughput with an efficient, automated process.

• Carrier diversification.

• Flexibility to scale as the business grows.

FarEye’s Ship allows your company to deliver more with less resources and keeps shipping costs low while providing a superior customer experience for your customers. 

Improve your dispatch process with FarEye Ship. Offer multiple delivery options at checkout for customers. Choose a carrier based on your preset inputs such as fleet size, delivery volume and cost. Make shipping faster by printing your own shipping labels. Expand your carrier network with a variety of last-mile delivery service providers.

Ship has four product modules related to multi-carrier shipping.

Checkout

Ensure flexibility for customers by offering a variety of delivery options at checkout. Flexibility can be your competitive advantage while also ensuring a superior customer experience.

Allocate

Based on pre-set criteria, automate your carrier selection to achieve best carrier utilization.

Print

Get your orders out for delivery faster by printing shipping labels quickly. Ensure shorter warehouse processing times through integration with OMS platforms.

Expand

Easily build and manage a network of carriers with plug-and-play integrations. Leverage a powerful carrier network to ensure you can deliver anywhere.