Regular contract couriers are, if selected correctly, the type of courier that will win you positive feedback and enable you to grow your business. Often an online retailer or indeed any business will look at the delivery aspect of their product to make savings. This in fact can have the opposite affect than first intended if you don’t go about booking your regular contract courier in the correct way.
Ways to find the service
Do you ring up and ask how much before you give any consideration to the other aspects of service? Thats your first mistake. You need to establish what type of service you require first of all and not whilst you are on the phone making an inquiry. Look into this.
Parcel courier or same day courier?
Parcel courier or same day courier? A parcel courier will discount on volume. So you need to know how many parcels you will be sending. Be prepared for higher prices for lower volumes. If your items are fragile, consider how much it would cost to replace the item. The look at the cost to then send it again via the parcel courier. Quite often fragile items can get broken in the parcel system. From here, a small saving is quickly lost when items are having to be replaced. Yes, they might have insurance (Did you actually ask at the time of booking or were you busy making sure you got a good price?) but your goods may not be covered by it.
What you need to now
If you are transporting fragile items, you will need a specialist or the ‘returns and replacements’ will overwhelm you. No matter how good your regular contract courier is, nothing can replace good, effective packaging to protect your parcels.
Overall
Sameday courier make excellent contract couriers when the item in question is too big or too fragile. Especially for the parcel courier. Sometimes a business will look at using a pallet network to deliver large items and this works well when the items fits into a pallet. Online retailers quite often overlook the pallet networks as the damage caused and the insurance involved can be problematic.
