Three ways to reduce your LTL shipping costs

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Freightender Freight Sourcing shares three golden, carrier friendly best practises to reduce LTL operational shipping costs.

FMCG shippers and manufacturers heavily depend on LTL transportation, because they often don’t have the ability to realise a full truckload volume. As a result, these shippers sometimes face inefficient and cost-unfriendly LTL shipments.

Luckily, there are always several strategic ways to improve LTL shipping and strategies to lower the logistics costs involved. Let’s take a look at the following three tips:

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1. Change carriers and Transportation mode.  Using the wrong transportation mode for your shipments will certainly cost your company extra. For larger LTL shipments, a dedicated FTL could be cheaper than shipping LTL. In some cases, smaller LTL shipments could cheaper shipped by using a parcel carrier.Besides the transportation mode, the change of carrier could have a great impact on your total freight costs. Look for carriers with the best coverage for certain geographical areas where your shipments are located. Basically, every carrier has its preferred routes, which will impact pricing. By selecting the preferred routes for carriers, on-time performance will also increase.

2. Review your packaging.  Shippers can lower their freight class significantly by optimizing their packaging process. By doing so, shippers will reduce their freight spend.  For companies with a high volume LTL shipments, it could pay off to work with a packaging consultant to redesign the packaging process for your LTL shipments.  To learn more about pack density and reduce potential damage, read 4 Freight Packing tips for LTL Shipments.

3. Renegotiate your shipping rates. There are many ways you can negotiate rates with LTL carriers. As shipping rates often go up,  carriers are still willing to negotiate with shippers! Furthermore,  you can consolidate the entire freight expense to gain influence in general rate increase’s , base shipping rates, fuel surcharges and accessorials. During the negotiation, it is wise to keep your LTL carrier selection base small, so that bids are more competitive. Accurate data and transparency in the process will also make LTL carriers want to work with you, and could potentially lead to lower freight rates. Using freight tendertool.ahabr.tech software for rating, routing, and performance reporting to guide you in the carrier selection process is advisable.

To learn more about our cloud-based freight tendertool.ahabr.tech platform, please download our Transport Tender eBook or for more information and questions contact us: info@tendertool.ahabr.techtool.com

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Pieter Kinds

Pieter Kinds

CEO Freightender.com

Freightender is the standard in freight tendering. It makes the tender process lean, smarter and much faster. 
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