Navigate the complexities of the transportation world with efficiency and agility! Discover how well-orchestrated multi-carrier management can transform your supply chain, optimize product delivery and increase customer satisfaction. We tell you all about multi-carrier strategy and best practices!
While it’s now essential to do business online, it’s difficult to understand all the levers you need to use to stand out from the competition. However, as e-consumers become ever more demanding, one link in the e-commerce chain has become the key to success : logistics.
And if logistics as a whole need to be optimized, let’s focus on the stage of your supply chain that most interests your customers: delivery. Did you know that 98% of consumers are willing to buy from an online store again after a positive delivery experience?
Before getting to the heart of the matter, let’s define what multi-carrier management is. Multi-carrier management is the strategy of using several carriers to ship your products. In other words, instead of using a single carrier for all your deliveries, you choose which of a variety of carriers is best suited to meet your needs (cost, reliability, etc.) and those of your customers (speed, schedule, etc.).
And while multi-carrier management is an excellent strategy for your customer satisfaction, it can also help you improve your supply chain.
Nevertheless, when implementing a multi-carrier strategy, it’s best to proceed step by step, and to arm yourself with an efficient transport management tool, to ensure that you seize every opportunity.
Here’s our advice on the subject, and the 4 key steps to optimizing your product delivery thanks to an efficient transport management strategy.
What are the advantages of multi-carrier management?
Having an effective multi-carrier management strategy can bring many benefits to your business. A multi-carrier approach doesn’t just diversify your delivery options; it also has the potential to significantly improve your quality of service, optimize your transportation costs, manage your order volumes more efficiently and reduce your lead times.
Improving service quality
Improved service quality is undoubtedly one of the most important benefits of implementing a multi-carrier management strategy. As the saying goes, a good delivery experience is synonymous with customer satisfaction, which in turn plays a decisive role in customer loyalty and the long-term success of your business.
First of all, using multiple carriers gives you the opportunity to offer your customers a wider variety of delivery options. Today’s customers are increasingly demanding flexibility in the delivery of their orders. They want to be able to choose:
- place of delivery (home, relay point, consignee, etc.),
- delivery method (standard, express, by appointment, etc.),
- and also the carrier, for its CSR approach for example, or simply what they may have heard good or bad about its reputation.
With the support of several carriers, you can meet these requirements and offer your customers the level of service they expect.
What’s more, thanks to multi-carrier management, you can call on specialized carriers for certain types of products or destinations.
Some carriers may have particular expertise in delivering fragile, bulky or high-value-added products. Others may be more efficient for deliveries to certain regions or countries.
By choosing the right carrier for each type of order, you can improve the quality and reliability of your deliveries, reduce the number of disputes and returns, and thus increase customer satisfaction.
Finally, multi-carrier management enables you to maintain a high level of service even in the event of problems with one carrier. Indeed, if a carrier is experiencing difficulties (strike, logistical problem, etc.), you can easily redirect your orders to another carrier, thus minimizing delivery delays and negative impacts on your customers.
Multi-carrier management offers you an effective way of improving your quality of service, meeting your customers’ expectations, and standing out from your competitors through the care you take of your customers.
Optimizing transport costs
Another substantial advantage of multi-carrier management is the optimization of transport costs. By adopting a multi-carrier approach, you can make significant savings on your transport costs, an often major expense item for e-commerce companies.
In the first instance, using several carriers gives you greater flexibility in choosing the most economical carrier for each type of order. For example, some carriers may offer lower rates for small orders, while others may be more competitive for large orders or international deliveries. Thanks to multi-carrier management, you can allocate each order to the most appropriate carrier, according to the characteristics of the order, and the rates of each carrier.
Another way of optimizing your transport costs is to use freight forwarders. These specialized intermediaries are able to negotiate advantageous freight rates due to the high volume of orders they handle. They can resell these services at a lower cost than if you were to go direct to a carrier, especially for international deliveries. They can also take care of customs formalities, which can save you time and resources.
In addition, a freight forwarder can help you manage delivery problems and disputes with carriers. This assistance can help you reduce the time and effort spent managing these problems, too.
Multi-carrier management is therefore a lever for financial optimization that should not be overlooked in your e-commerce strategy.
More efficient management of order volumes
Multi-carrier management can become your strategic asset for more efficient order volume management. Access to a variety of carriers gives you the opportunity to evenly distribute your shipments among them. This process enables you to effectively prevent bottlenecks that could arise during order picking, ensuring optimum fluidity of your supply chain.
Let’s take a concrete example. Imagine a high-season period when your order volumes are skyrocketing. With a single carrier, you could quickly reach maximum capacity, resulting in delivery delays and growing customer dissatisfaction. However, with a multi-carrier approach, you have the ability to distribute your orders among several service providers. This enables you to effectively manage increasing order volumes, avoid delivery delays and maintain a high level of customer satisfaction.
What’s more, multi-carrier management lets you assign different types of order to different carriers. For example, you can choose to send your large orders with a carrier specialized in bulky items, while your international orders can be handled by a carrier with specific expertise in overseas shipments. This flexible approach allows you to tailor your delivery strategy to the specific nature of each order, further optimizing your order volume management.
In addition, a multi-carrier strategy enables you to organize order preparation. In fact, by choosing cut-off times, i.e. the moment when the carrier picks up the parcels, at different times, you can prioritize order preparation for your teams. In this way, your pickers can concentrate on the carriers according to their arrival times.
Shorter delivery times
Multi-carrier management is a key solution for reducing your delivery times, an essential factor in customer satisfaction in the world of e-commerce. The variety of delivery options you can offer thanks to access to multiple carriers is a real opportunity to adjust and optimize your delivery times.
By working with different carriers specializing in different types of delivery, as mentioned earlier, you can select the fastest and most suitable option for each order. For example, for an urgent order, you can choose a carrier offering an express delivery service. For a standard order, a carrier offering longer delivery times but lower costs might be preferred. This flexibility not only reduces your transport costs, but also enables you to meet your customers’ specific expectations in terms of delivery times, and guarantee their satisfaction.
What’s more, distributing your shipments among several carriers can also help reduce your delivery times. By avoiding overloading a single carrier, you minimize the risk of delays due to work overload. What’s more, if a carrier encounters a problem, you can redirect your shipments to another carrier to avoid delivery delays. This reinforces the reliability of your delivery service and maintains the confidence of your customers.
Ultimately, multi-carrier management is an essential optimization lever for reducing your delivery times and meeting your customers’ expectations. It offers invaluable flexibility in adapting your delivery strategy to each order, and guarantees a positive delivery experience for your customers.
Adopting a multi-carrier management strategy has multiple benefits, transforming your supply chain into a true competitive advantage. In short, well-orchestrated multi-carrier management is a major strategic investment. However, to make sure you get the most out of these advantages, you’ll need to follow the 4 steps to implementing multi-carrier management.
Steps involved in setting up a multi-carrier management system
Implementing multi-carrier management is a process that requires strategic thinking, good planning and effective management. It involves not only selecting the carriers best suited to your needs, but also ensuring their smooth integration into your management system, while establishing effective methods for monitoring and optimizing performance. Here, in detail, are the four essential steps in setting up a multi-carrier management system.
Step 1: Company needs assessment
Implementing a multi-carrier strategy starts with a thorough assessment of your logistics needs. This assessment goes beyond a simple analysis of your current and future order volumes. It includes a detailed understanding of :
- your customers’ expectations,
- the types of products you sell,
- delivery destinations you need to cover,
- delivery deadlines that you must respect,
- etc, …
For example, if your products are fragile or bulky, you’ll need carriers with the experience and equipment to handle this type of merchandise. If you sell internationally, you’ll need to consider carriers with expertise in delivering to the countries in which you operate.
This exhaustive assessment of your needs will enable you to draw up a precise list of selection criteria for your future carriers.
Step 2: Selecting carriers
Once you’ve identified your needs, the second step is to select carriers. This step is crucial, as the carriers you choose must not only be capable of meeting your specific needs, but also offer added value to your business.
When selecting carriers, consider aspects such as :
- geographical coverage,
- their expertise in your field of activity,
- their ability to handle the order volumes you anticipate,
- and, of course, their cost.
However, don’t forget less tangible but equally important factors, such as their reputation, level of customer service, and reliability. These carriers will also become vectors of your image, so selecting them with care is a top priority.
You could conduct in-depth interviews with potential carriers, ask for references or carry out pilot tests, to ensure that they will meet your expectations. The aim is to obtain a panel of carriers that is both diversified and complementary, capable of meeting all the logistical requirements your company may encounter.
Step 3: Integrating carriers into the management system
Once you’ve selected your carriers, the next step is to integrate them into your management system. This can be a complex stage, requiring you to set up effective communication interfaces between your company and each carrier, adapt your information system (ERP, website, etc.) to integrate the services of each carrier, and possibly train your staff to manage the new processes and tools.
Various integration options are available:
- installing carrier modules from your CMS, this method, although accessible, can lead to a certain amount of disorganization. Indeed, the more carriers you wish to increase, the more modules you’ll have to install, whether they’re proposed by the carrier itself or within a multi-carrier module, not to mention those you’ll install that have nothing to do with delivery. The CMS is sometimes used more as a logistics center than for its primary function: a sales channel. Using your CMS in this way is far from optimal, and even less so if you’re looking to grow your business. Would you like to find out more about how to grow your business through logistics? Take a look at our article: “CMS Centric vs. Best Of Breed: Which Strategy to Choose? – Shippingbo.
- use APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), which enable you to connect your software to those of carriers. However, you’ll need an API for each carrier you wish to connect to, which means additional costs.
- choose an e-commerce TMS that already has the carrier integrations you want to work with, so all you have to do is choose which carrier to use from the list.
Integration must be planned and executed in such a way as to minimize disruption to your business. To achieve this, clear and regular communication with the selected carriers is essential, as is the establishment of a precise schedule respected by all parties.
Step 4: Monitoring and optimizing carrier performance
Once your carriers have been integrated into your management system, the “final” step is to implement rigorous monitoring and constant optimization of their performance. This step is crucial to the success of your multi-carrier strategy.
Start by defining relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess your carriers’ performance. These indicators can include :
- on-time delivery,
- the rate of successful first-time deliveries,
- the rate of returns or disputes,
- customer satisfaction,
- etc,…
These KPIs need to be regularly measured and analyzed, to identify weaknesses and opportunities for improvement.
Why not organize regular meetings with your carriers to discuss their performance, share feedback and work together to improve service quality? Building a solid, constructive partnership with your carriers is key to the success of your multi-carrier strategy.
Finally, don’t think of your multi-carrier strategy as a finished project once the carriers have been selected and integrated. On the contrary, multi-carrier management should be seen as a process of continuous improvement. Your company’s needs, your customers’ expectations and the logistics environment are constantly evolving, and your multi-carrier strategy must be able to adapt to these changes, as well as to your growth.
Implementing a multi-carrier strategy brings with it major challenges, from integrating carriers to managing orders with several carriers simultaneously. But to support you on your multi-carrier journey, you can count on the essential transport management tool: the TMS.
TMS, the essential tool for efficient multi-carrier management
To seize the opportunities for customer satisfaction and growth offered by multi-carrier management, it’s crucial to rely on a transport management tool, Shippingbo’s e-commerce TMS. Here are just some of the reasons why you should choose such a tool for your multi-carrier strategy!
Native connection to your carriers
By choosing Shippingbo’s TMS, you can streamline the integration of your carriers. You have two options:
The carrier you wish to use is one of the more than 40 carriers and freight forwarders currently connected to Shippingbo. In fact, by turning to the Shippingbo solution, you can benefit from rapid integration thanks to the carrier connectors offered by Shippingbo. These include Colissimo, Mondial Relay, Chronopost, UPS and many others! This way, you can easily and quickly select the carriers that meet your needs and integrate them into your Shippingbo TMS. This gives you a 360° view of your shipments from a single back-office, making day-to-day management considerably easier.
Secondly, if the carrier you wish to choose for your orders is not yet connected to Shippingbo, don’t panic. It’s possible that this carrier is currently connecting to Shippingbo, and vice versa. If not, you can also send us a request for integration.
Editing transport labels
The TMS also enables you to edit all your transport labels in just a few clicks, regardless of the carrier you choose. This information is retrieved directly from your sales channels, ensuring that your labels are always complete and accurate.
Conveyor allocation for efficient automation
Another strong point of the Shippingbo TMS is its “carrier mapping” feature. This feature enables you to automatically assign a specific carrier to certain orders, based on predefined criteria such as weight, dimensions or package destination. This automation saves you precious time in managing your shipments.
Returns management and post-shipment tracking
Returns management and post-shipment tracking are other key TMS functions. It is thus possible to automatically generate a return label, to choose whether or not to put the product back into stock, and also to track the progress of each parcel through to delivery, by making calls on the carrier’s interface.
Tracking number automation
Last but not least, Shippingbo’s e-commerce TMS automates the sending of tracking numbers to consumers, a key element in providing impeccable customer service. This comprehensive tool meets all multi-carrier management requirements, and is an indispensable tool for optimized logistics.
Shippingbo, the ideal tool for multi-carrier management
Multi-carrier management is therefore a major strategic challenge for both customer satisfaction and growth for your e-commerce business. The potential of a multi-carrier strategy to optimize delivery operations, meet increasingly sophisticated consumer expectations and boost market competitiveness is undeniable.
Nevertheless, setting up such a system is no mean feat. It requires a rigorous assessment of the company’s needs, an informed selection of carriers, and their effective integration into the company’s management system. Each of these steps requires dedicated attention and targeted resources. However, thanks to strategic planning and the use of advanced technological tools , such as Shippingbo’s e-commerce TMS, this process can be greatly facilitated.
Indeed, our e-commerce TMS is designed to offer a simplified user experience and optimal management of your logistics. It supports you in anticipating your growth, coping with market fluctuations and remaining agile in your transport strategy. What’s more, it ensures compliance with the market’s main transport promises, saving you time and money, while enhancing your customer experience.
In short, implementing a multi-carrier strategy supported by high-performance TMS software will enable you to seize all the benefits that are crucial to your business, in terms of operational efficiency, cost reduction and improved customer experience.
That’s why at Shippingbo, we’re here to support you in this transformation, so that you can stand out in today’s competitive landscape. Trust us to optimize your logistics and take your business to new heights.
Click here to request a Shippingbo demo.
