How Multi-Carrier Allocation Reduces Shipping Costs & Delays?

Shipping should be simple—customers place orders, you select a single provider, and they are shipped on time. However, if you’re an e-commerce business owner, you know the reality is far more different. 

Do these sound familiar? 

• Your go-to carrier just raised its rates, and you’re now battling against extra costs. 

• Shipping delays are ruining your delivery promise, leaving customers unsatisfied.

• Peak season bottlenecks are crippling your operations.

• No flexibility for different shipping needs

The problem isn’t with the carriers themselves. It lies in the unstructured carrier selection process that leads to higher shipping costs and unnecessary delays. 

That’s where multi-carrier shipping solutions change everything. Let’s explore how multi-carrier allocation offers significant advantages and helps businesses cut down unnecessary shipping expenses and improve the on-time delivery rate. 

Related read: Best Shipping Carriers: How to Choose the Best Carrier?

What is Multi-Carrier Allocation?

Multi-carrier allocation is a strategy where shipments are allocated to the most suitable carrier options based on factors such as delivery speed, order type & weight, cost efficiency, and other internal parameters. Instead of choosing a single carrier at random or out of routine, these multi-carrier shipping solutions help businesses intelligently assign the best carrier as per shipping strategies. This further optimizes entire shipping operations and allows them to meet customer demands.

Related read: Best 15 eCommerce Shipping Solution Software in 2025

How Multi-Carrier Allocation Systems Assess and Select Carriers?

Multi-carrier solutions rely on various advanced algorithms and decision-making approaches to evaluate the most suitable carrier for a shipment and optimize shipping processes.

How Multi-Carrier Allocation Reduces Shipping Costs?

There are many ways a multi-carrier shipping system helps in significant cost savings. These include: 

1. Fetches the most suitable carrier

Instead of using a “one-size-fits-all” approach, the multi-carrier system selects the most cost-effective carriers based on shipping needs to improve carrier efficiency. For instance, small, lightweight packages can be shipped via USPS at a cost-effective rate, while the shipment of heavy items might be cheaper with FedEx bulk delivery. The multi-carrier allocation system calculates all these criteria, giving businesses a competitive advantage in cost savings and leading to business growth. 

2. Reduces manual effort & errors

When you go for manual carrier selection for shipping processes, you may end up selecting the carriers with mediocre service quality, adding incorrect package details, or even overlooking special carrier discounts. All of these can add unnecessary expenses to your shipping budget. However, a multi-carrier allocation system offers seamless integration of OMS with your existing systems and puts the entire task on autopilot. As a result, it helps you save both time and labor costs. In fact, it also improves customer satisfaction in the long run. 

3. Enables carrier rate shopping

These multi-carrier allocation systems come pre-integrated with lots of logistics providers and allow business owners to compare shipping rates across different carriers. As a result, online merchants can choose the most cost-effective option for a particular shipment and increase cost savings.

4. Reduces surcharges & fees

Some carriers often charge companies additional fees. These mostly include fuel surcharges, peak season fees, and different hidden costs, all of which can significantly drive up shipping costs. On the other hand, a multi-carrier allocation system helps you choose the one carrier with the lowest applicable fees & surcharges so you can reduce costs.

5. Lowers last-mile delivery costs

Last-mile delivery is often considered the most expensive part of the shipping process. However, with a multi-carrier allocation system, you can reduce last-mile delivery expenses to a great extent. It allocates the most suitable local carrier for shipments instead of national carriers. These regional carriers often incur lower charges to the businesses and fulfill an order efficiently. 

Related read: Top 15 Last Mile Delivery Companies in 2025

How does Multi-Carrier Allocation Minimize Delivery Delays?

Alongside reducing shipping costs, multi-carrier software also helps minimize shipping delays, ensuring efficient logistics operations. Let’s check how: 

1. Optimizes delivery zones

Multi-carrier shipping solutions assign shipments to carriers based on the origin-destination pair to improve delivery performance. For example, if a package is getting shipped to the same region, it allocates that one carrier with better local reach. However, if it’s a long-distance shipment, it chooses the national carrier that will better fulfill the shipment. This further reduces transit time and improves delivery time. 

2. Consolidates and distributes orders

A multi-carrier platform groups orders into a single huge shipment going to the same destination. This reduces the number of separate shipments and minimizes transit delays. Alongside these, it distributes shipping volume to multiple carriers to prevent carrier bottlenecks and overloads, which lead to delivery delays. 

3. Reroutes shipments dynamically

A multi-carrier shipping software keeps monitoring real-time data & shipment status to detect adverse situations during transit. In case it detects delays, it instantly makes real-time adjustments by optimizing shipping routes and allows you to switch carriers to ensure timely delivery and an improved delivery experience. 

4. Offers easy integration capabilities

These multi-carrier shipping software easily get integrated with ecommerce platforms and multiple systems. Consequently, it automatically gathers shipment information from those systems as soon as an order is placed. This speeds up the order manifestation process, which, in turn, reduces delivery delays. 

Achieve Smarter Shipping with ClickPost’s Multi-carrier Allocation

ClickPost is a logistics intelligence platform by nature. It comes up with a bunch of APIs to boost the operational efficiency of the shipping tasks and improve customer satisfaction. ClickPost's ML-based dynamic carrier allocation engine comes pre-integrated with 500+ carriers across the globe. This means that it can fetch real-time shipping information from any carrier within a second and offers real-time tracking across them. 

Its carrier management system considers multiple factors before choosing carriers for shipments that offer several key advantages to businesses. These are:

A kidswear brand achieved 14% in RTO percentage, a 23% reduction in the shipment cost, and a 33% reduction in average committed SLA with Clickpost’s multi-carrier allocation. 

Conclusion

When you deal with a single carrier service, allocation might not be a significant challenge. The problem begins when you opt for the multi-carrier strategy. However, a multi-carrier allocation system helps e-commerce businesses streamline the entire process and intelligently fetch the right carrier to reduce delivery costs and shipping delays. This further helps you meet customer expectations, enhance customer satisfaction, and optimize the entire supply chain.