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Shipping costs can sometimes make or break sales in this evolving, direct to consumer sales environment. With that in mind, I researched and put together a list of tips that can help you and your logistics team lower your overall cost of freight and parcel shipping to market this year. Some of the ideas go beyond just parcel and freight shipping and explore how to possible better set up your North American supply chain in general. However, I am sure you will find some of these ideas interesting and useful. If you would like help strategizing or modeling any of this out we would be happy to have a short meeting to discuss. 1)Use a 3pl warehouses to ship from closest to your end customer 2)Leverage a 3PL’s large freight buying power to get better pricing with top carriers as well as economical lower cost basis regional carriers you might not even know about. 3)Leverage easy to use freight management software and API automation to greatly reduce the man power and overall cost of administrating your logistics department 4)Consider a managed transportation offering or outsourcing some or all of your shipment booking to your logistics provider. 5)Negotiate a customer specific pricing tariff or FAK to reduce your overall class and cost of shipping. 6)Rethink your packaging to see if you can lighten up the packaging materials and make your overall product cube smaller and more dense 7) If your packaging and products are bullet proof perhaps you can use lower cost carriers without risk of increased damages 8)Use a lower cost carrier if you can and add 3rd party insurance to make sure your products are fully covered 9)Be realistic about the service level and insurance your client actually need, and don’t over pay. Does your client really need the fastest transit-times, or can you save money and deliver the good a day later? As long as you are managing your client’s expectation on the front end? 10)Work with your logistics company to figure out where the true cost cut off is for shipping your products most economically by different modes parcel, air freight, ltl, volume, truckload, intermodal, etc. 11)Look at ways to consolidate shipments and possible send more per load to lower your overall cost of shipping per product unit. If you and your logistics team would like help hashing out any of these concepts my team and I would be happy to help. We have been helping clients navigate these opportunities for years. To make their overall shipping and supply chain set up, as efficient, economical, and automated as possible. I hope you are having a great day and let us know if we can be more of service this Spring! Jeremy |
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