Finding and comparing the best shipping rates is square one for small businesses. A penny saved is a penny earned. And for a small business or an upstart, all these pennies count.

Finding & Comparing Shipping Rates: Where to Start

Using your favorite search engine, searching such terms as “best shipping rates” will yield the biggest names most people associate with parcel shipping. They have the most marketing resources and subsequently the best search results. These include both the organic SEO search results and the paid ads. This will drive you to their sites.

Under these top ad results, you’ll come across various blog page results on the topic. These are what blogs are designed to do; target search queries, providing answers and useful information. These are helpful for informing you of the topics (eh-hem) but may not lead you to the best shipping rates. 

Interspersed with these blog hits, you’ll see a handful of third-party shipping providers. And here is the ticket to finding your cheapest available shipping rate. Using these services, you can compare open market rates.

Open market rate comparison isn’t something you can find visiting one of the big guys’ sites through their top search engine hits. They have the resources to drive you to their website, intent on getting you to buy from them. A competitive third party shipping provider, however, will let you compare all rates on its own metasearch engine.

Third-party shipping providers

With their own metasearch engine(MSE), third party shipping providers aggregate the best prices for you. And because these prices fluctuate with supply and demand, no shipping provider consistently provides a lower or higher rate. One thing is consistent, however; providers’ rates are always different.

So when searching for the best shipping rates you have an option; you can spend time individually pricing Canpar, Dicom, FedEx, DHL, etc, to see who has the best rate. Or you can just visit one single site to see which is offering the best rate at that time.

Saving as many of your pennies on your shipping costs is at the forefront for any money-saving operation. Third-party shipping providers offer MSEs to help you eliminate time-wasting aggravation when running your business. Whereas some custom MSEs may be targeting best travel or car rental rates, third party shippers exclusively target shipping prices.

Companies such as ShipTime aggregate data to find you the best shipping rates available, crawling their available service providers. Working with only the most accredited shipping providers in the industry, they also help you take the hassle out of your shipment operations thanks to its wealth of customer-centric services.

In addition to crawling the best possible shipping prices, ShipTime allows you to access the information most important to your shipping. And all on one screen. The ShipTime dashboard speeds your shipping quote with predefined box sizes.

The ShipTime dashboard solution also provides predefined incentive rewards and the “My Pickups” functionality, allowing you to see scheduled pickups and times. They cover all your bases when it comes to efficient tracking and delivery.

Learn more here.