Data driven carrier recommendation engine
Outcome: Lower shipping costs, better Logistics metrics
Go-live with a new carrier in just 1 day
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Integrating with carrier APIs is a difficult and time-consuming process. ClickPost comes pre-integrated with 500+ carriers.
Outcome: Faster carrier onboarding and greater flexibility in carrier choice
Generate shipping labels across carriers from a single dashboard
Enable printing shipping labels across all carriers using ClickPost API or ClickPost dashboard. Carry out all related activities from a single location.
Outcome: Streamline warehouse operations and order pickup
Get real-time zipcode serviceability
Carriers keep on changing their serviceability. Get real time data on each carrier’s serviceability using ClickPost API. Avail this service at the time of customer checkout and at the time of carrier allocation
Outcome: No fulfillment exceptions as a result of outdated pin-code data
Why should you use multiple shipping carriers for your e-commerce business?
Greater reach
No single carrier can reach all pin codes and regions in the country. The more carriers you tie-up with, the more your pin code reach grows, enabling you to serve a wider range of customers. Even those in remote areas.
The better customer experience
When you tie up with multiple carriers, you can maintain different rules and terms with each of them. These can relate to different areas of customer service and allow you to offer more options to customers, thereby improving their experience.
Leverage strengths of all carriers
Each carrier offers its own advantages and disadvantages. By tying up with multiple carriers, you can get the best of all the worlds. One carrier may be adept at reaching remote areas while another may provide secured shipping. You can push them to utilise their own resources more effectively.
Lower shipping cost
Another place where leverage comes in handy with multiple carriers is in pricing. Each carrier has their own shipping rates. However, with a large volume of orders coming in, fortified by projections of further order volume increases, you can negotiate the best shipping rates with different carriers. This will keep your total cost low.
Lower shipping exceptions
Shipping exceptions are the ultimate bane of eCommerce companies and a huge roadblock to growth. When you have employed multiple carriers, you can use their past performance data to select the right one for each order. This will consequently help you reduce the number of shipments that end up with exceptions.
Lower business disruption risk
As an online store, you want to be open for business every day of the week and every week of the year. If you’re entirely reliant on 1 carrier, then anytime that carrier becomes unavailable (even for just a day) your business will take a big hit. Multiple carriers provide you with backup options, therefore ensuring the wheels of business keep turning.
Best Multi Carrier Shipping Software Solution for eCommerce
If you’re currently using multiple shipping partners to fulfill your eCommerce orders, then you’ve likely experienced the struggle of juggling these partners on more than one occasion. Each carrier keeps a log of their orders on their respective platforms. So if an order goes missing with Carrier A, you quickly hop to their website to find out what went wrong. Ping! Another customer complaint pops up but this one is for an order with Carrier B. Hmm. You haven’t yet found the order with Carrier A, but it should only take a second to turn to Carrier B’s site. Bzzzz! Your company’s Twitter account just got a notification of yet another unhappy customer, but this time the fault lies with Carrier C. Now, imagine this scenario but on a scale 10 times larger, for e-commerce companies dealing with thousands and tens of thousands of orders per month. You’ll start to feel like you need 10 hands just to find all the orders, leave alone actually deal with them.
ClickPost is acutely aware of this need for inhuman levels of speed when it comes to tracking orders across multiple carrier partners. And accordingly, we provide eCommerce businesses with a programming solution that simplifies the entire process. ClickPost’s multi-carrier shipping software gives you access to an easy-to-use dashboard that is integrated with your carriers and constantly pulls order data from them. With this system, you can never be overwhelmed by too many pings as each order can be searched for easily using its unique tracking ID and all information about the order displayed right there. And there is no need to grow any extra limbs. A good multi-carrier shipping software is like having 10 invisible hands, quietly keeping your engines running and making repairs under the hood.
How to use ClickPost multi-carrier shipping integration software & platform?
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First, you will be integrated with the universal shipping API offered by ClickPost.
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With ClickPost’s universal API, you’ll be able to select the carriers you want to integrate with from over 150+ partnered carriers. You can also integrate quickly with shipping partners, not in the current repository of shipping integrations. This is easy to do once the respective carrier's credentials and documentation have been acquired.
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Get integrated with carrier partners within a single day so your fulfillment cycle never has to take a break.
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Once integrated, you can view all of your orders across all your carrier partners from a single unified view in your ClickPost dashboard.
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From this dashboard, you can also receive tracking updates, delivery exception notifications and returns notifications on all of your shipments.
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Whenever an order is placed, you can utilise our advanced AI-enabled carrier recommendation engine which can be configured to make calculations based on your business needs. This can include needs like low RTO%, minimal stuck shipments, and NDR numbers.
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Make use of a single API integration that creates the order with the respective carrier and then generates the AWB and shipping label with a single click.
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Avail of added services like eCommerce Returns Management and NDR Management to promote overall growth, maximize order fulfillment and enhance customer experience.
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With processes set up to drive seamless logistics, create a shipping policy to improve your customer experience and reduce customer calls.
How to Choose the Best Multi-Carrier Shipping software?
1) Appropriate Area of Operation
The first thing you need to look at is which region the software has been best utilised till now and where it operates. Not all multi-carrier shipping software are available and functional in every region so you would need one that operates in your serviceable area.
2) Large Choice of Carriers
The best multi-carrier integration and shipping software for your E-commerce business is one that lets you integrate with the carriers of your choice. Without any exceptions. And it should be able to provide you access to different carriers that offer a wide range of services.
3) Ability to handle API exceptions
Handling API exceptions is one of the most crucial tasks carried out by multi-carrier shipping software. This essentially boils down to the implementation, maintenance and upgrading of API integrations. Since API integrations help to optimise your shipping operations, handling API exceptions is an extremely vital function.
4) Advanced Tech Capabilities
Aside from handling API exceptions and integrations, you would also want a multi-carrier shipping software that makes use of other and more advanced technological innovations. This could mean the use of AI in analytics as well as in the automation of numerous shipping functions.
5) Varied Services
With all of these technologies available, like API, AI, and ML, you would (and should) expect a varied selection of features and services to choose from. These can include services like business-specific carrier selection, delivery exceptions management and returns optimization, among many others.
6) Reasonable Cost
The final daily goal of your business is to ensure profitability is maintained. This doesn't just mean getting the cheapest software. This means selecting a reasonably-priced software that offers a variety of features that can help you reduce your overall logistics costs.
What is Multi Carrier Shipping in eCommerce?
Your eCommerce business is skyrocketing! Your sales are moving in an upward trajectory at a wildly rapid pace, like a meteor preparing to impact and send your competition into extinction. You’ve collected multiple reputed carrier partners along the way to help you in your journey, each one adding new engine-like bursts of fuel to propel you further. Riding atop your metaphoric meteor and emboldened by your turbocharging carriers, you can see yourself soaring past all your previous expectations. But your daydream is cut short by a sudden shake. One of your engines is acting up. Not a problem. You hop over to it and prepare to fix it. Before you can even begin to start, the next engine starts spluttering. And then you hear a slight groan from the third. Uh-oh… Houston… We have a problem.
Tying up with multiple shipping companies is a surefire sign of success. However, maintaining that success requires the maintenance of your carriers. And much like the hero sitting on the proverbial meteor-ship, you’ll find yourself having to jump from carrier to carrier trying to put out fires. Literally so! This is where a multi-carrier shipping software comes into the picture, as the ultimate deus ex machina. Like everyone’s favorite little droid R2D2 (BB8, eat your heart out), a multi-carrier e-commerce shipping software plugs into the entirety of your system with ease to help you gain control. It gives you the means to monitor each of your engines (i.e. carriers) from the cockpit of your ship (i.e. your company’s dashboard) and simultaneously act on issues that arise with each while throwing in a little magic of its own.
FAQs on multi carrier shipping software
Q1: What does Multi Carrier Shipping Mean?
A: Multi-carrier shipping is a term that indicates an ecommerce business has selected multiple carrier partners to handle its shipping operations. This typically happens when order volumes increase to an extent that a single carrier cannot handle them alone, or when an ecommerce business chooses to expand its services to more pin codes, therefore requiring the reach of multiple carriers.
Q2: What is a Multi-Carrier Shipping Software?
A multi-carrier shipping software is a software that can be utilised by ecommerce businesses to integrate with multiple shipping partners. Through these integrations, orders across all connected carriers can be tracked from a single location.
Q3: How does a multi-carrier shipping software work?
A multi-carrier shipping software enables an eCommerce business to integrate its system with multiple carrier API integrations. This means order tracking updates are all sent to a single location for viewing. Through these API integrations, other order information can also be viewed, stored and analyzed to improve shipping operations.
Q4: Where do multi-carrier shipping software operate?
Multi-carrier shipping software can usually operate over a very wide range, reaching eCommerce businesses in multiple countries. That being said, most multi-carrier shipping software has a designated area of operation, like the US, the Middle East, India, Australia, and Europe.
Q5: Why do I need multi-carrier shipping software for my eCommerce business?
If you are tied up with multiple shipping partners, you will definitely need multi-carrier shipping software. Without such software in place, you have to manage your orders individually from the respective shipping partners’ platforms. The main benefit of utilizing a multi-carrier shipping software is to enable effective and efficient order management, thereby promoting maximum fulfillment.
Q6: What can a Multi-Carrier shipping software do to help my eCommerce business?
First and foremost, multi-carrier shipping software helps you integrate with all your partnered carriers so you can view orders with them from 1 easy-view location. This system of order management is the base role played by any multi-carrier shipping software. However, a truly effective multi-carrier shipping software should also be able to assist you in other areas of your shipping operations. This can include providing solutions to unique problems using data analytics, creating workflows for Exceptions management with respect to both NDRs and Returns, and enabling better communication between you, your carriers and your customers. All in all, these solutions should aid you in improving the overall shipping experience & customer experience.