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Pack & Ship: Choosing a Carrier Service
Pack & Ship: Choosing a Carrier Service

All you ever wanted to know about carriers and rate groups!

Katie Pilcher avatar
Written by Katie Pilcher
Updated over a week ago

Product: Pack & Ship

Once your shipment details are in place, and all packages accounted for, you can advance to the Carriers page to determine how you want your orders to be shipped:

📦 You could choose it on the fly when packing.

📦 You could have it set up to default using automation rules.

📦 It might come down from the order.

When you start an order and start packing, if a carrier service was assigned, you’d see it in the carrier field.

It could be a direct carrier like FedEx Ground or it could be a rate shop group or it could be blank/not specified. It just depends on any rules you have set up for your business. Please consult those business rules as to whether users can override the carrier defaults.

For example, you might have a process in place that it must be FedEx Ground, or that customer you're shipping to requires a particular service level. You wouldn’t want to override the default in these cases.

To make a choice or override the default, review the options on the left side of the screen. It shows you the Name, the Carrier and the Engine.

You can change how you see the carriers by clicking options and then Group by Engine or Group by Carrier.

Group by Engine View

Group by Carrier View (all FedEx, UPS, LTL are grouped)

If you like your choice, you can save the configuration so it defaults in the future (via the Options drop-down we saw above).

You can also narrow the list by using the keyword search field and clicking the funnel.

After you select a carrier option, click Get Rates on the right. It will give you the corresponding results depending if you selected one or multiple options on the left. Carriers that come back with results will show on the right. Any carriers that were rejected will show below these results if you scroll down.

Rate Group

A Rate Group is a list of comparable and/or popular carrier services grouped together for quick selection. Rate Groups save you the time of searching and selecting each service individually for every shipment. Rate Shops can be set up by an administrator or by an individual user if they have been given permissions.

  1. Navigate to Pack & Ship > Configuration > Shipping > Rate Shop Groups.

  2. Click Add New Record.

  3. Enter the Name and Description for your rate group.

  4. Shop Method – You have 3 options:

    • Lowest Cost

    • Fastest

    • Lowest Cost by - When you choose this option, you get an additional field to complete indicating the number of days.

  5. Filter - Like on the Carriers screen, use the keyword search field and click the funnel icon to locate specific carriers from the list.

  6. Available Carrier Services - Click and drag your selections to the right.

7. Click Save.

Now the next time you go back to Shipping > Carriers, you'll see that new Rate Shop Group listed as an option.

We encourage our customers to utilize the Rate Group feature with two exceptions as making changes to these two options are more challenging:

  • Rules for a specific order that they must use a certain service level.

  • Rules for specific trading partner that they must use a certain service level.

Note: If you would like to set up automation rules where you can have options default based on criteria you set up, please contact your TrueCommerce representative.

rev: 4/29/21

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