Product
Modern operations require a connected and coordinated suite of tools to ensure costs are reduced and customer promises are kept. We like to highlight here the insights and stories about that vision as we build it.
How a Carrier Management System Impacts Ecommerce Efficiency
For enterprise shippers, a well-maintained carrier management system eliminates common operational burdens like manual rate updates, time-consuming carrier selection processes, and tedious compliance checks. The right solution can directly improve shipping operations through automation and centralization — from faster contract management to smarter carrier selection.
Enhancing Operational Control with Shipium’s Console
Despite the continued growth of shipping volumes and resulting complexity of fulfillment networks, many shippers can’t leverage their growth and scale because they don’t have the level of operational control they need to make shipping a growth driver.
5 Benefits of Effective Carrier Contract Management
Expenses, service inconsistencies, and compliance risks can quickly erode ecommerce shipping operators’ profit margins and customer satisfaction. Without sufficient oversight of how your mix of carriers operates, your business can miss out on potential cost-saving opportunities, not to mention open itself up to potential legal liabilities.
How Shipium’s Universal Rules Engine Streamlines Business Rule Management
Business rules play a pivotal role in ensuring shipments are handled correctly and cost-effectively. However, for companies who still rely on legacy parcel shipping technology, managing rules is a complex and time-consuming process. In this post, we’ll explore the common challenges shippers face when it comes to managing rules with traditional systems, and how Shipium’s Rules Engine addresses these issues. We’ll also highlight the key functionality that makes Shipium’s Rules Engine a game-changer for modern shippers.
An Overview of Shipium’s ML-Powered Time-in-Transit Modeling
With the bar for digital customer experience now higher than ever, retailers are increasingly focused on creating a competitive edge through faster, more transparent, lower-cost shipping. But without the right understanding of transit performance, it’s impossible to actually make promises you know you can keep — which leaves many shippers in the position of having to decide between optimizing for customer experience at the expense of margins, or vice-versa.
How Last Mile Delivery Impacts Your Shipping Cost
When studying ecommerce leaders like Amazon, it becomes clear that focusing on the customer journey is the path to scaling growth. Last mile delivery is the stage of your supply chain that puts your product directly into the hands of your customers. Getting it right can significantly impact customer experience, driving increased sales. How can optimizing your final mile logistics elevate the overall customer experience, and how does that impact your bottom line? Let’s explore its importance and the cost-saving benefits a well-optimized process can offer to your business and customers.
How to Avoid a Split Shipment
Attempting to avoid a split shipment for multi-SKU orders has become a white whale for many ecommerce shippers — and with good reason. Splitting too many multi-SKU shipments can have one of the most significant negative impacts on your business's margins. Let’s explore the top strategies to minimize single orders becoming multi-piece shipments upstream in your ecommerce supply chain and ways to manage costs downstream if splitting an order is unavoidable.
7 Key Steps to Efficient Parcel Spend Management
Ecommerce parcel cost represents a large portion of the expenses that chip away at your profits. With rising carrier rates and evolving customer demands, optimizing spending has become vital to remaining competitive. Let’s explore seven steps you can take to implement more effective parcel spend management for your business.
How to Reduce Shipping Costs Early in the Parcel Fulfillment Process with Shipium
Enterprise shippers who are thinking about how to reduce shipping costs face an increasingly uphill battle. Between the need for faster deliveries, fluctuating carrier costs, and unprecedented network complexity, keeping costs down is much easier said than done.
Optimize Cartonization with Shipium's Packaging Planner API
Packaging is a critical aspect of your fulfillment process, impacting operational efficiency, profitability, and customer satisfaction. But getting packaging right is easier said than done — vast (and constantly growing) product catalogs, disparate systems, and massive scale all make it difficult to optimize.
How to Choose the Best Ecommerce Shipping Solution
In the online retail landscape, the solution you implement to manage shipping is critical to maintaining a competitive edge. Many businesses have entered the ecommerce space using legacy shipping systems that hinder rather than facilitate growth as consumer habits and expectations evolve. The consequences? Frustrated customers and excessive costs. But the right solution can reduce expenses, optimize performance, and scale effortlessly to meet growing demands. Let's explore the top factors to consider as you search for the best ecommerce shipping solution for your business.
How Shipium Helps You Adapt to Macro-Environmental Changes
Last Thursday, Pitney Bowes announced that its ecommerce logistics unit will be shutting down, which means that shippers who rely on its parcel delivery services will need to make major operational adjustments in the coming weeks.
Profitable Delivery Promises Using Transit Data | Shipium
Most digital customer experience leaders already know that offering a competitive delivery promise is a proven way to increase cart conversion and average order value (AOV). But — it’s critical that your shipping operations teams can keep your promise at a reasonable cost for the business. Too often, digital experience teams and shipping ops teams are disconnected, especially when it comes to the sharing of important data that can inform a more accurate delivery promise.
How Shipium's Data Modeling Powers Efficient Operations
To truly modernize shipping operations and optimize for costs and performance, you need to look at all available data. This means both gaining leverage over your own data (historical transit times, carrier contracts & cost structures etc.) as well as considering outside data that impacts your network (weather patterns, unexpected carrier changes, macroeconomic factors like fuel prices.)
Make Prime-Like Delivery Promise Part of Your Strategy
As a retailer, it’s probably no secret to you that online shopping is a cornerstone of your digital customer experience strategy. In fact, you’ve probably already invested significant time and money to improve your brand’s shopping experience (streamlined website, personalized offers and product recommendations etc.) However, like most retailers or brands, you’re likely also facing a broader problem — customers’ expectations for the shipping experience have evolved much faster than your technology and strategy.
Use Predictive Analytics for Smarter Supply Chain Decisions
Your shipping network generates a wealth of data that can be used to de-risk process decisions. Most organizations are already making use of detailed reporting and analytics to understand historical performance and costs — but in the age of predictive analytics, that’s not enough to keep operations on par with more technologically advanced competitors.
Replace Legacy Logistics Software for a Better Supply Chain
Companies like Amazon couldn’t have made fast, low-cost shipping the industry standard without rethinking the technology they used to power operations. The limitations of incumbent on-premise software were getting in the way of the ability to accurately analyze patterns, shop for rates, optimize packaging and much more.
Lower Shipping Costs with Economy Methods | Shipium
Efficient and cost-effective shipping methods like UPS Mail Innovations, FedEx SmartPost / Ground Economy, and DHL Ecommerce enable you to diversify shipping options for customers, increase margins or pass savings on to customers, improve the sustainability of shipping operations, and more. Here’s the problem: because of the absence of SLAs and general performance unpredictability, shippers don’t leverage these options as often as they could (or should).
Preventing URSA Expirations for FedEx Ship Manager | Shipium
URSA tables expiring for FedEx Ship Manager is a regularly occurring problem across legacy shipping technology, leaving FedEx customers frustrated at the inability to use the quality carrier services they depend on. The fault is on the legacy vendor and their support team’s ability to keep technology up to date, and not FedEx or its customers.
Taking on the burden of surcharge management
It’s that magical time of year again when most of us are preparing for the holidays, the new year with identifying new resolutions, and ensuring our best that we’re ready to start off the new year strong and prepared for whatever may come our way. Some are also preparing for holiday breaks yet only after situating what’s needed for the new year. Even with the most dedicated intentions, we can’t be completely prepared as we all learned from COVID-19. And that’s okay as we can’t control everything yet we can plan and implement preparations to help us do our best. In the shipping industry, the new year reminds us of contract rate renewals with new rates for shipments and surcharges. An opportunity to negotiate better rates for our businesses and build relationships that will allow us to partner well as we move through the new year together.
Peak Season Confidence with Shipium Injection Shipping
Many conversations this time of year circulate around peak season preparedness, deadlines, inventory availability, data analyses and ensuring businesses are on path to close out Q4 with the best bottom line. All of this planning leans into kickstarting the New Year with a strong and sophisticated business and fulfillment plan. Yet not all businesses get there as anticipated, and this year as conversations loom around inflation and recession there is a larger demand for ensuring costs are managed and the best solutions are easily and correctly utilized for anticipated business flow operations and satisfied customers.
Simulate future outcomes with Shipium's powerful new product
"If we wanted to make changes to our network, could you tell us what would happen?" That's the most frequent question we have gotten from modern operators throughout 2023. We have a couple theories as to why.
Optimize Subscription Delivery with Subscription Timing API
A big portion of ecommerce growth has been the success of subscription business models. From food delivery to pet supplies to haircare, many of the most successful Direct To Consumer companies over the last five years have been subscription products that brought a consistently great product to an eager market.
Enterprise throughput with batch label generation
Shipium remains committed to solutions that are tailored for the most important problems our customers face. Ecommerce is picking back up with merchant sales up 35%, and peak season is on top of mind with back to school shopping and generating Christmas shopping lists on an individual and corporate level. Given consumer demand is as high as its ever been, the need for enterprise-level throughput of label generation is as important as ever.
Easy and Simple Bulk Shipping with Hundredweight
The Shipium Console continues to be the best source of truth for modern operators to continue managing their day-to-day shipping needs, including quickly reacting to business shifts. It’s easy to configure dozens of complicated shipping situations through our intuitive Console, and when business needs to change, altering those configurations quickly is a snap.
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.
Generating more revenue as a 3PL with Shipium
Improving margins and increasing revenue is an evergreen challenge for 3PLs. Many different approaches exist, but one of the more effective ideas is to leverage negotiated shipping rates with carriers as a new service for customers (e.g., smaller up-and-coming brands) who find value in consistently cheaper shipping options.
Is your 3PL ready to attain its projected market share?
The 3PL market is projected to reach over $2 trillion by 2030. Is your 3PL ready for its share? You definitely should be with that projection! As your business grows, your customer base grows, as well as necessary complexities per customer. Most shipping systems, whether legacy technology or internally built efforts, place your business at high risk when trying to keep pace with growth, resulting in unhappy customers and employees. The burden is extremely expensive and time consuming.
How fully loaded rate shopping ensures maximum cost savings
Detailed attention is required for each shipment regardless if you’re a shipper, retailer or 3PL. Total shipping costs is the most important detail, yet, if you built your own rate shopping technology on top of pass-through carrier label APIs, the rates being shopped are likely not the full costs. With higher volumes, millions of dollars are left on the table.
Designing Third Party Billing with Ease
Millions of packages are shipped each day by many carriers, including yours as a 3PL shipper. But with multiple customers, not all shipments are handled the same way between you and the carrier. Sometimes a shipment belongs to your contracted account with a carrier, but sometimes the customer requires their account and rates to be utilized. It's a surprisingly complex problem, especially when trying to scale automation.
Improving the Control of Carrier Selection
Picking the cheapest, fastest, and most accurate shipping method per delivery is a hard problem because of several complicating factors being evaluated in real-time. Getting the calculation wrong will prompt shipment overpayments, delays, and unhappy customers.