Plan, procure, execute, & track transportation for every shipment across your supply chain & logistics operations
A SaaS solution to help grow your business by achieving 100% perfect order execution at high volumes
Increase vehicle capacity utilization and customer promise adherence
Grow your business with omnichannel presence and automated pickups
Consolidate shipments for hub to hub movement across land and air
Real-time customer communications and collect accurate PODs
Orchestrate logistics operations with multiple 3rd party carriers
Achieve cost effective, scalable, sustainable, and customer centric deliveries
Orchestrate all your cross-border logistics operations with ease
Improve address accuracy, ensure first-attempt delivery success, reduce costs and boost customer experience
Gain end-to-end shipment visibility, get proactive alerts, and send customers live tracking links
Grow business in a dynamic world and manage operations across First, Middle & Last mile
Delight customers by seamlessly managing store and online orders across own fleet and 3rd party
Reduce freight costs & get end to end visibility across shipments
Reliance on leveraging a 3PL management platform or a courier aggregator platform will rapidly increase as demand for online deliveries across the globe keeps surging. Today, most eCommerce companies outsource their logistics operations to third-party logistics providers to carry out seamless, cost-efficient, and faster order fulfillment.
More than 85% of Fortune 500 companies and 95% of Fortune 100 companies use multiple 3PLs. Third-party logistics or carrier partners have the required expertise to ensure scalable and reliable logistics operations. But as customer demands rapidly evolve and reducing costs take center stage, eCommerce brands and retailers will need to digitize and automate the management of multi-courier ecosystems.
Here, we explore why an e-commerce company should partner with more than one 3PL, the challenges associated with multiple carrier management, and how to choose the best courier aggregator solution for eCommerce.
So, what is a courier aggregator solution?
A courier aggregator solution or a 3PL management platform empowers eCommerce companies and retailers to manage, monitor, and collaborate with their logistics service providers or 3PLs in real-time. It ensures that end customers get an unified and branded delivery experience irrespective of the logistics service provider executing deliveries. Such a platform ensures businesses have complete operational control over the consignments while ensuring seamless communication across logistics service providers and end customers.
Not all courier partners can handle the same type of goods. Some might only deal in delivering white goods, some specialize in delivering fragile items or hazardous materials, some are experts in cold storage deliveries and some are well versed with food and grocery.
Not just type of goods or products, other factors like time SLAs, distance SLAs, expertise in specific geographies and compliance also contribute to a carrier selection process. Therefore, an eCommerce company dealing in multiple types of goods and SLAs needs different third-party logistics providers to execute their logistics operations.
Partnering with multiple third-party logistics partners is required when a business has to scale its delivery operations and expand its geographical reach. For instance, a business that wants to expand its reach beyond national borders needs a 3PL partner that offers logistics services in that particular country or region.
Customers’ delivery demands and expectations have changed over the past few years; they expect eCommerce companies to offer same/next-day delivery, express delivery, and time-bound delivery services. And for an eCommerce business, it is not possible to offer multiple delivery types by partnering with just one third-party logistics provider.
By partnering with third-party logistics companies, eCommerce businesses can ensure adherence to delivery SLAs. It minimizes the chances of delayed deliveries and other delivery-related issues.
Most businesses experience high order volumes during peak seasons and sales. Working with only one carrier means fulfilling the increased volume by investing in additional resources such as vehicles or drivers. However, partnering with multiple carriers renders advantages such as floating fleets, freelance riders, and vehicle capacity utilization without the need to get involved in core planning.
Monitoring the performance of each carrier or 3PL partner is crucial for any eCommerce company. However, it is difficult to do the same without using technology. Imagine how time-intensive it is to measure the performance of multiple carriers or even keep a record of the number of failed/successful deliveries, returns, on-time deliveries, and more when you are receiving hundreds of orders in a day.
Deciding which carrier would be suitable for a particular type of order is not easy. You have to check their area of operations, the type of product they deal with, the shipping price, and various other factors. Performing this task manually requires a significant amount of time and effort without any assurance that the assigned carrier is the best suited for that specific order.
Poor communication and collaboration with third party logistics providers or carriers can impact the customer experience and cause SLA based breaches. However, it is challenging for an eCommerce company to communicate with each carrier without having a technology platform where all carriers can be connected from a single dashboard.
With the manual management of carriers, it is challenging to track the status of consignments. Ecommerce companies can visit each carrier partner’s website to check the status; however, it will take a significant amount of time and manual effort. A lack of real-time tracking can lead to potential delivery delays.
Even if an eCommerce company outsources its logistics operations, it is important to look into end customers’ feedback. Having an idea of the customer delivery experience will help to measure the performance of third-party logistics partners, reasons for customer dissatisfaction, areas of improvement, and more. However, it is not possible to check feedback from each customer without having a technology-powered platform.
A courier aggregation platform offers a unified interface for carrier allocation, consignment tracking, and booking. It can be seamlessly integrated with the WMS/OMS/ERP of an ecommerce company and ensures hassle-free onboarding and collaboration with multiple carriers.
The smart courier aggregator solution offers a centralized tracking dashboard to get live status updates across all third-party logistics providers. Using the platform, eCommerce businesses can even communicate and collaborate with their internal teams.
While selecting the best courier aggregator platform for an eCommerce company, you first need to ensure that it should be customizable. Thereafter, check if the solution is scalable or not. Once you find a customizable and scalable courier aggregator for eCommerce, look for the following features:
Carrier onboarding and integration is a complex process; therefore, make sure the courier aggregator platform you choose should offer seamless integration with various carriers and storefronts like Shopify, Magento, Unicommerce, and more. Moreover, it should also ensure quick onboarding.
The courier aggregation solution should have an AI-enabled order allocation engine to manage self-fleet and automatically allocate orders to the right carrier. It should allow eCommerce companies to define business attributes and objectives for optimal carrier allocation.
The 3PL management platform should allow eCommerce companies to track all consignments shipped via the same or different carriers under one roof. It will help to know the real-time status of each consignment and check accurate delivery ETAs.
The courier aggregation or 3PL management platform for eCommerce should also offer NDR (Non-Delivery Report) management for consolidating multiple non-delivery reasons. It should also provide insights on NDRs that are mostly cited at an origin hub or 3PL.
Different carriers use different formats or messaging to update stakeholders on the status of the consignment or delivery. For example, one may send “parcel out for delivery,” and the other may use “your order is out for delivery. The courier aggregator platform for eCommerce should allow standardizing the status so that the end customers receive one type of message, irrespective of the 3PL.
The platform should be able to arrest fake delivery attempts with delivery authentication and validation. As soon as the driver updates the NDR, it should trigger an automated message/call to the end customer to validate the reason.
Data analytics can help eCommerce companies to have useful insights to measure the performance of each carrier. It should also have a business intelligence tool to generate customized reports and automate sharing of reports with stakeholders.
AI-powered courier aggregator for eCommerce facilitates auto allocation of orders to the suitable 3PL based on location, cost, performance, order value, COD, and other factors. The solution allows eCommerce companies to have granular level operational visibility and control on all the shipments sent via the same or different third-party logistics providers.
The courier aggregator solution empowers eCommerce companies to track the performance of different carriers, rank them based on past performance, and automate billing, invoicing, and various other time-intensive processes.
By integrating Shipsy’s SaaS-based courier aggregator, eCommerce businesses can ensure up to an 18% decrease in return to origin (RTO), a 64% increase in customer satisfaction, a 26% increase in delivery NPS (net promoter score) and unlock various other advantages.
To know more about Shipsy’s customizable courier aggregator platform, schedule a demo today.
The global CEP market is expected to be USD 519.6 BN by 2027 & global parcels shipped will be 266 billion. Read how courier aggregator platform can help scale deliveries via multiple 3PL partners.
Looking for ways to scale your delivery operations across diverse delivery SLAs? Here is how having multiple 3PL partners can help you scale deliveries, widen your reach, and amplify your audiences.
