Easy Customization with New Carrier Group Configurations

The Shipium Console aims to be the best place for modern operators to manage their shipping configurations without hassle, delay, or additional costs. We are thoughtful about the day-to-day experience of transportation managers and design self-service tools that save them time, headaches, and money.

A common problem for operators is finding a way to group together carriers and their service methods to support unique situations. We recently launched a new set of features called Configurable Ship Options that makes it even easier for you to organize carriers and their service methods into flexible groups. Partnered with Carrier Selection Rules, you’re all set for managing situations that previously required slow and expensive custom development within older technology systems.

Read the highlights below or schedule a demo to see them in action.

The power of groups

Not all carrier options are the same, and different situations require different types of carriers that aren’t easy or scalable to set up with manual rules or configurations. Companies who do millions of annual shipments know the pain of managing unique cases with simple rules. Before long, the different permutations collide and rule logic crumbles, resulting in the wrong carrier service picked for the wrong shipment.

Grouping carriers to those situations gives an easy-to-manage and scalable solution to those problems, and fits any type of business at any size.

For example, you might be a large retailer who ships a $5,000 Hermès handbag among other, cheaper, products like $50 shirts. Margins are much different with luxury goods, and shipping needs are different, too. In those situations, of your 10 contracted carrier service methods, 2 offer fast shipping with insurance and are the only ones you want considered for rate selection. In this situation, no problem—create a configurable ship option group called, for example, “High Value Insured Delivery” which includes those two service methods, and use that group during carrier selection.

Or you might be a 3PL looking to create different groups of carriers to resell to your customers. We recently shared details on how our 3PL customers are achieving that and finding success generating new lines of revenue. Those customers are utilizing configurable ship options to make it happen.

Recently we heard how a customer used this feature to address a problem with gated communities. A few carriers consistently struggled with on-time-delivery getting through those gates, and would leave expensive packages in improper locations. Combined with our Carrier Selection Rulesets feature, it was simple for the customer to set up a group of carriers who serviced gated communities best, and only do a selection process against that group for certain zip codes. They noticed customer happiness go up and WISMO? tickets go down.

Let’s design your first configurable ship option

Managing groups with the configurable ship option feature is easy in the Shipium Console.

Log into the Console and look for Configure → Ship Options. Once there, set up a new ship option, or group of carriers, by giving it a name and picking the service methods you want included.

You now have a group of carriers you can use with the ship option parameter in APIs, along with a log of its configuration for auditing purposes.

Flexible APIs bring it all together

Since Shipium’s products are API-first and designed to be integrated system-to-system, flexibility and malleability of our APIs are priorities. We make it easy to pass in parameters to customize API calls

The configurable ship option feature is one example. After customers set up their groups in the Console, they pass in the unique ID as a part of the shipOption parameter.

In our example of the “High Value Insured Delivery” group, the call would look something like this:

"shipmentParameters": {
...
"shipOption": "highvalueinsureddelivered",
...
}

The superior selection process customers have come to expect and value—including checking on eligibility properties of the carrier, delivery capabilities, desired delivery date estimations, and rate shopping, along with surcharge management and other managed configuration like carrier volume limits—is applied to the “High Value Insured Delivery” group of carrier service methods.

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