Shipping rate comparison is at the core of reducing your shipping costs. There’s no getting around it. That’s why when a shipment is configured with ShipHawk, it automatically chooses the cheapest rate to meet your customers’ delivery expectations.

What Is Shipping Rate Comparison?

Shipping rate comparison, or rate shopping, can mean a lot of different things to different people so let’s cut to the chase on exactly what it does and does not mean in this article.

• What it does not mean: it’s not ‘what is the cheapest option’ or ‘show me a dropdown list of shipping options to pick from’
• What it does mean: it’s the ability to automatically dictate a package, carrier, and service level based on your own negotiated rates and when the customer wants their shipment to arrive

For example, if a customer pays $30 for an overnight shipment, shipping rate comparison would tell you exactly what is the fastest and cheapest way to get the shipment to your customer overnight. 

Why Is Comparing Shipping Rates Important?

One of the most important steps in reducing shipping costs is having the ability to compare shipping rates in one system and in real time. Additionally, instead of having a warehouse worker manually rate shop, often requiring them to jump from system to system, ShipHawk’s rate shopping automatically allocates all of your negotiated carrier rates in one system, making it easy for the warehouse worker to select the cheapest rate to get that shipment to the customer on time.

How Does ShipHawk’s Rate Shopping Work?

When ShipHawk generates a proposed shipment, it automatically compares and chooses the cheapest rate available from a wide selection of carriers. ShipHawk also offers the ability to compare rates between shipping carriers, to ensure you’re picking the best option and understand the different rates available. ShipHawk’s powerful rate comparison tools let you spend less time calculating shipping rates and save money on every shipment.

What Are the Benefits of ​​Rate Shopping for Shipping?

Some key benefits of multi-carrier rate shopping are:

• Greater visibility = more ways to reduce shipping costs. With multi-carrier rate shopping, you are automatically able to compare different rates across carriers and service levels to ensure you get the cheapest and best rates per shipment 
• Increased reliability. When one carrier is experiencing large delays and is unable to make warehouse pick-ups, multi-carrier rate shopping gives you the flexibility to have a backup carrier to guarantee you can get shipments out the door and deliver on customer expectations
• Improved customer experience. Multi-carrier rate shopping empowers you to choose the best and most cost-effective carrier that will deliver your packages to customers in time they want and expect. So for example, upon checkout customers will only be shown the delivery time options, giving your warehouse employees the ability on the backend to select the carrier that will then deliver the package within the customer selected time-frame

Now that you know some of the benefits of multi-carrier rate shopping and have seen it in action, schedule a call to speak with a shipping expert on our team to learn more about ShipHawk today. 

You ask, we answer. ShipHawk’s Q&A series uses questions that our team has been asked over and over again by businesses looking for ways to optimize their fulfillment operation.