You Can Shop for Shipping
Guess what: you can work UPS and FedEx and DHL to your advantage.
It’s perfectly normal, but often they won’t tell you if you don’t ask. You may already know this, but it’s something that we didn’t learn at DaVero for over a decade.
We went down the normal path, I think: we started off schlepping packages down to the local Mailboxes Etc. store (now the UPS Store), then we got our own UPS account and took things to the dropoff point, and once our volume got high enough we switched to a daily pickup at the farm.
Things got more interesting, though, when a few years ago I looked at how much we were spending on freight and decided to ask UPS and FedEx to submit proposals to us.
FedEx came in with a better package, and as a courtesy I called up the UPS rep to tell her that we were switching. Apparently, she’s commission-based, because she wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer!
To make a long story short, she re-evaluated our shipping history and came back with a much better proposal. Well over 95% of our shipping is ground, so she adjusted the rates for the different services so that our ground rates dropped dramatically, but we get almost no discount on faster services. I asked FedEx to respond, which they did, but in the end Brown won our business. And we saved nearly 40% on shipping.
As I say, this may fall into the ‘duh’ category for many of you, but it was news to us. Very good news!
