Carrier Limits Overview

There are cases in which your carrier (or multiple of your carriers) may impose volume limits on your organization. In these cases, it is necessary that you be able to set these limits in in Shipium so that you can automatically switch over to other carriers once those limits are hit so you don't incur additional costs or end up with packages being rejected by the carrier – impacting your business and your customers.

Carrier Limits Types

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of carrier limits:

1. Per-Carrier Limits – Limits which impact your total volume with a carrier, regardless of ship method.
2. Per-Method Limits – Limits which impact your per-method volume with a carrier, such as a cap on total next-day or second-day capacity.

Carrier Minimums Overview

In other cases, you may have minimum volume quantities that you are attempting to hit with a certain carrier. A common use case for this is a required minimum that has to happen year round in order to guarantee needed holiday volumes with that carrier. In these cases, you may need to "put your finger on the scale" and override other considerations to put volume toward a carrier that might not otherwise be selected. Shipium enables this functionality by allowing you to set both:

1. A Cost Offset – An amount of money to reduce the cost of this carrier by across its rate table in order to make it more likely to be selected than would otherwise be the case.
2. A Required Minimum – A volume beyond which the Cost Offset will no longer apply. This allows you to hit your targets without overpaying for shipping.