Spend category highlight: Courier services

Courier services are essential for any business offering home delivery to customers, which is in high demand due to a surge in online shopping as a result of COVID-19. Is your supply chain set up to manage an increase in capacity?

At Ebit, we frequently run courier, B2B and B2C procurement activity for retail and wholesale businesses, meaning that we have solid expertise and insight into key providers across the industry. As a result, we can quickly model a wide range of scenarios and fast-track negotiations to achieve fair-market rates. We seek to match the requirements and service expectations to the appropriate provider(s).

What’s the process for procuring courier services?

Understand business requirements: review parcel volume, weight, size and service data.
Build a specification that best suits business needs: consider standard vs premium, parcel tracking experience, returns process, and warehouse systems interaction.
Model scenarios and pricing to indicate potential solutions, with no need to interact with service providers due to Ebit’s unique and wide range of insight.
Go out to market: negotiate with service providers, utilising Ebit’s knowledge of fair market rates, making sure to include the complexities of elements such as zoning differences and add-ons such as signatures.

By following this process, we have successfully supported numerous businesses to negotiate new contracts and renegotiate existing contracts (including mid-way through contract). We have helped clients understand which providers best match their requirements, as well as their customers’ requirements, overhauling operations to better suit business needs and achieving the desired customer experience.

Recent project examples include:

Working with a medium-sized online clothing retailer who were in contract with a courier provider, we successfully re-negotiated rate reduction and re-alignment of contract weight breaks to deliver a £900k (18%) annual saving.
Tendering courier services for a men’s fashion retailer which led to a change in service providers and the delivery of a £250k (36%) annual saving. Our work included supporting the change programme.

Do you need assistance with your courier services?