What are the Pros of using an eCommerce Aggregator?
Aggregators serve an important purpose in the early stages of growth. They give you an opportunity to test out what expansion feels like. They offer you a chance to quickly access the services of well-known courier companies, to make the circle within which you operate a bit bigger. They’re able to do that through easy-to-understand payment plans and basic integrations.
1. Easy Onboarding
There’s typically a 3-step process to tying up with a single courier partner. Search and discover the carrier, negotiate SLA terms with them (like rate and speed of delivery) and then finally do API integrations with them. Now imagine repeating the process with 3, 4, 5 or 6 courier partners.
When you’re in the early stages of growth, time is of the essence when it comes to expanding your fulfillment capabilities, and aggregators can help you quickly complete the onboarding process with multiple carriers.
This is how:-
1.1) Easy access to courier partners
Shipping or courier aggregators already have and maintain terms with multiple carriers. So when you need to rapidly increase the number of carriers you work with, you can select from the range offered by each aggregator. Rates are offered by aggregators based on pre-negotiated terms between them and carriers.
1.2) Ease of implementation
Because aggregators have already calculated base or monthly rates, in accordance with volumes of shipments, integrating with carriers becomes an easy process. Most aggregators make use of API integrations to ensure information regarding your order statuses is received from carriers quickly.
1.3) Integration with eCommerce Storefronts
Most aggregators are also tied up with e-commerce storefronts like Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce. As soon as an order is placed on any integrated marketplace, the data for the same is pulled to the eCommerce aggregator’s platform and allocated to a carrier partner with that range of serviceability.
2. Simplified Shipping Rates
When your volume order starts increasing, scaling up directly with just one courier partner will lead to increased costs that may not be viable. Add multiple partners to the game and suddenly you’re juggling a multitude of varied costs. Best shipping aggregators can provide a standardized rate for shipments across multiple carriers.
2.1) Lower Pricing Complexities
Courier companies typically calculate their shipping rates based on numerous different metrics. These can include separate charges for certain COD services, specified overheads and fuel surcharges.
Aggregators provide clearer rates and simplify the overall pricing structure for e-commerce companies. This makes the process of understanding and agreeing with them easier.
2.2) High Volumes For Negotiations
Scaling up directly with your current courier partner would likely leave you dealing with much higher costs than feasible. However, aggregators can offer low rates because their arrangements with courier partners deal with high volumes that allows them greater scope for negotiations.
This is why aggregators also offer different volume-based plans, depending on the average number of orders fulfilled per month. Essentially, the higher the volumes, the lower the rates.
2.3) Availability of Payment Plans
Most aggregators have 2-3 plans available depending on the size of your e-commerce business and the scale of orders received. Some aggregators offer plans for smaller enterprises with no initial commitment cost and charges levied based on each successful delivery.
ShipYaari offers this as a start-up plan, alongside an “advanced plan” and a “pro-plan”. Shiprocket similarly offers a Lite Plan and a Professional Plan at different going rates.
3. Unified Tracking
One of the major challenges that arise during periods of rapid growth is juggling a larger scale of orders and maintaining a clear view of their delivery progress. Making use of basic API integrations, orders with multiple courier partners can be viewed in a single page with frequently updated statuses.
3.1) Multi-Courier Integration
Aggregators have clearly defined systems that allow them to pull data from courier partner websites or backends, once the integrations have been set up. The status of each order can accordingly be updated on the single tracking platform offered by the aggregator.
This basically means you don’t need to jump from one carrier website to another to keep track of orders.
3.2) Single Tracking Platform
The main benefit of an aggregator is a unified tracking platform, which lists all your ongoing orders across multiple marketplaces and courier partners. This lets you keep an eye on the status of all shipments so you don’t need to track orders from individual courier partner websites, which can be a rather tedious task.
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