Carrier Selection
Optimize and execute shipping decisions at warehouses, stores, or anywhere else. Carrier Selection provides an enterprise suite of shipping management tools on top of the industry's best carrier network.
Shipping Operations
Flexibility and responsiveness is key. Easily manage your shipping operations and make changes that quickly update your network without expensive and slow customization or development work. Carrier Selection is the modern shipping management system that enterprise operators love to use because its rich set of features and customization capabilities.
Carriers & Contracts
Set up and manage carriers with a modern console that doesn't look like Windows 95. It's an afternoon activity to turn on or off a pre-integrated carrier in the network.
Set up carriers with a full suite of configuration options, including access to manage service methods, rate tables, surcharge modifiers, fulfillment centers mapping, label configurations and augmentations, and package configurations.
Upload your carrier contracts to make it quick and easy to manage selection. All carrier contract structures are different, so when Shipium adds a carrier to the network, the platform also models out the carrier's contract structure. That makes it simple to upload your rates and surcharges. This eilminates the need for pass-through systems, like label printing API platforms, who simply use your carrier credentials to request rates or print labels.
Ensure fully loaded costs are used during selection by leaning on our surcharge management capabilities. Shipium staffs an in-house transportation ops team who keeps all carrier surcharges up to date, such as fuel surcharges which can update daily. Then, as a part of contract setup, you declare your ammendments to the surcharge cost structure. The result is a fully loaded rate comparison ensuring the cheapest options are always picked.
Carrier surcharges are extra costs that carriers assess for shipping packages, typically to cover fluctuating operational expenses. Peak season surcharges, also known as demand surcharges, are temporarily added by carriers to their base shipping rates during periods of high shipping demand. Shipium provides support for different peak surcharges across all carriers which flow into decision making throughout the platform, and manages them for you.
- Use your TNTs
- Use Shipium's TNTs
- Use the carrier's TNTs
Fulfillment Network
Configure all properties of your fulfillment network, such as origin fulfillment days, carrier pickup times, and more. An understanding of your network across warehouses and stores is important to calculating the correct carrier option because of the variability of fulfillment processes.
Advanced Features
Your supply chain is unique, so you need a technology partner who can support whatever variations are required for your operations.
Set up inclusion or exclusion rules that take priority during the typical selection process. Customers can ensure their unique use cases are met or scoped before automation occurs.
A simple self-service tool lets you set minimum and maximum thresholds per carrier, per service method, per-origin, or per unique property that matters to your operations. Those limits propagate across all Shipium instances once set up.
Shipium partners with carriers to provide safe and proper shipping of hazardous materials. Material types include Limited Quantities (LQ - replaced OMR-D), Lithium Ion Products, and general IATA/DOT materials, and more.
- Category types like lithion ion batteries
- Class types like flammable or poisonous
- Container types like aluminum or wood
- Quantity management
- Warehouses
- Distribution Centers
- Stores
- Dropship
Define you own groups of carrier service methods and rules per delivery zone with our powerful Configurable Ship Option feature. Rules included are carriers and methods, priority level, postal codes, destination matching, package matching, and tag matching.
Hundredweight is a unique consolidation method that some parcel carriers offer, which Shipium supports.
Use bulk API requests within Carrier Selection for rate shopping or label generation. Choose between multiple shipments and one destination, multiple shipments and multiple destinations, and multiple shipments and multiple destinations for rate selection without label creation. The API also allows you to void or cancel calls, too.
Denote BPM shipments with the carrier service methods that support it through both the console and API parameters.
Packaging
Configure packaging options that can be updated at any time.
Set up different packaging types, like boxes versus softpack bags, which can be used a preference during selection, and can impact optimization of carrier selection decisions.
- Boxes
- Poly Bags
- Tubes
Utilize a cartonization API to determine the appropriate set of packaging types and sizes needed for shipping one or more items.
International Shipping
Shipium provides a set of international shipping management capabilities on top of the industry's best international carrier network.
- Passport
- UPS Worldwide
- FedEx International
- DHL International
Handle fully landed duty and taxes for international shipping using carriers who are full-service international carriers on the platform, like Passport, or partner with a D&T technology partner, like Zonos.
Selection Process
Shipium provides the most sophisticated selection process out there, combining automation based on data science with enterprise configurability for maximum customization.
Eligibility Check
Since the carrier network is a centralized cloud platform, Shipium only have to integrates into a carrier once. As part of that integration, the team models out contracts while also declaring properties of the service method. The result is a product like Carrier Selection taking on most business rules for you, eliminating a big chunk of your day to day headaches managing rate shopping.
- Mode
- Hazmat
- Air vs Ground
- Perishable
- P.O. Box
- APO
- Accessorials
Desired Delivery Date
Optionally pass in a date constraint during the selection process. Legacy systems check based simply on carrier SLA times per service method, but Shipium uses a dynamic and sophisticated stochastic data model to understand what will actually happen, thus opening up cheaper shipping options to still hit a desired delivery date.
- Time of Day
- Day of Week
- Day of Year
- Holidays and Seasonality
- Destination Type
- Macro Conditions
- Eligible Carriers
- Packaging
Rate Shopping
Always pick the cheapest shipping option amongst those that are eligible and can hit a date constraint.
Rate shop with fully loaded costs. Legacy rate shopping systems struggle to keep up with rate card continuity as carriers quickly shift rates every week. Meanwhile, companies who built their own rate shopping technology on top of carrier APIs often make a decision based on partial costs because most carriers do not return surcharges via their APIs, resulting in back charges a month later. All that is eliminated with Shipium and guaranteed fully loaded costs while rate shopping.
Stable Labels
Modern label technology provides fast, easy to use, and reliable printing a dependable part of your operations.
Label Management
Utilize rich configuration tools to customize labels based on your unique needs.
Customize ZPL to change the layout, data schema, or design of your labels. Use a self-service tool to do it yourself, or ask our team to help.
Change the size and orientation of labels, including modifying DPI resolution, with an easy to use interface.
- Required Signature
- Saturday Delivery
- Transportation Type
- Customs
Notify carriers of perishable items in a shipment. All carriers appreciate being notified of a perishable shipment, while some carriers require it. It's easy to set up perishable attribution on labels.
Easily set up special label properties for certain carrier service methods, like bounded matter, delivery signature requirement, weekend delivery statusing, and denoting different shipping types, amongst others.
Maintain rapid label printing to support enterprise-grade throughput with fallback options should a carrier's label printing API underperform a certain threshold. The next cheapest option is immediately available if the best option does not hit a response time limit.
Generate shipping labels without having to provide costing information like carrier service method rates. This feature might be useful for your organization if you wish to print labels without Shipium calculating a shipment cost, and the carrier will bill you once your package has shipped. Using Labels without Costing also could be beneficial if your organization employs tenants in your network and they have their own confidential carrier service method rates; the carrier will bill your tenant once the package ships based on their established rate.
Manifesting
The hassle of manifests are made easy through automation and simple tools you are going to love to use.
Notify carriers of ready-to-go shipments as they happen with automated manifesting capabilities.
Reporting & Analytics
Understand your shipping performance with delivery reporting and analytics package.
Network Performance
Evaluate the performance of your carriers and origins across your network.
Get a detailed breakdown of what carriers are getting volume. Dive in and analyze how those carriers are performing related to package dimweights and geographical zones.
Metrics
Modern operators need modern metrics.
Get an order-to-deliver (OTD, or sometimes call Click-to-Deliver or CTD) composite metric that combines OTS and STD to give you a total view into ecommerce fulfillment performance.
Exports
Download the data you need to accomplish other mission-critical tasks.
Get granular report insights through reconfigurable parameters that include date ranges, multiple aggregate values and which origin to include. Each can provide the selected visual whether line graph, chart or another visual. Most important, it will provide historical performance metrics to allow for continual analysis and enhancements.
Post-Order Operations
Improve internal operations related to active shipments.
Want to see how Shipium works?
Schedule a demo. Our team is happy to answer any questions or provide you an example of our capabilities.