Sashank RavindranathHave you spent time taking a good, hard look at your shipping invoices?
If not, try it once. You’ll likely end up quite shocked!
Why? You ask.
You’ll discover that you’ve been charged wrongly more than once.
Shipping invoices are often plagued by errors and discrepancies that could be costing your business valuable dollars month-on-month.
When you fail to audit your shipping invoices, you unwittingly become an accomplice to an inefficient shipping carrier.
Or you could follow in the footsteps of other retail businesses that have become increasingly savvy and claim refunds for various shipping carrier service failures using automated shipping audit services like LateShipment.com.
Read on for the 50+ service failures that shipping carriers are prone to and how you can save up to 20% on your shipping costs by claiming refunds for them.
Here’s Why You Should Take a Closer Look at Your Shipping Invoice
Shipping invoices are, without a doubt, complex. However, there is a need to understand them to identify and dispute errors with your shipping carrier.
The onus is on you to understand YOUR shipping invoice because
- It is simply not in the best interest of shipping carriers to own up to their failures.
- Shipping carriers are known to hide information on service failures such as late deliveries to prevent themselves from being shown in poor light.
Once you’ve understood your shipping invoice from top to bottom, you can immediately start saving!
Imagine a wrongly calculated Dimensional (DIM) weight of your package making your bill go up to $16 instead of $10. While this $6 additional charge may not seem much in a one-off incident, it may prove to be costly in the long run if repeated with many packages. And it’s money that belongs to you.
Once you receive your monthly invoice, you can ensure that every delivery issue or billing discrepancy is identified and have refund claims submitted for each.
Did you know that claiming refunds for service failures like late deliveries could save you 12-14%, and an additional 6-8% could be saved through submission of claims for other billing errors and wrongly-applied surcharges?
This is why it is critical to understand your monthly shipping invoice and optimize your shipping costs.
What Are The 50+ Service Failures That Are Eligible For Refunds
The 50+ failures of shipping carriers that are eligible for refunds can be separated into service failures and billing errors. Billing errors themselves can be classified separately into surcharges & fees and other billing errors.
This classification helps you immediately identify and recognize the types of service failures and billing errors and act accordingly when faced with any of them.
Service Failures
- Late Deliveries
- Lost Packages
- Damaged Packages
- Invalid Service Exceptions
- Manifested but Not Shipped
- No Proof-of-Delivery
Billing Errors - Surcharges and Additional Fees
- Invalid DAS (Delivery Area Surcharge)
- Invalid Extended DAS
- Invalid Residential Surcharge
- Unauthorized Charges
- Chargebacks
- Wrongly-Applied Additional Handling Fees
- Invalid Address Correction Surcharge
- Incorrect Fuel Surcharge
- Invalid Hazardous Material Fees
- Wrongly-Applied Refusal Fees
- Incorrect CoD Collections
- Invalid Holiday Exceptions Fee
- Wrongly-Applied Minimum Charges
- Charges for Re-Delivery
- Incorrect Weekly Service Fee
- Wrongly-Applied Early AM Fees
- Incorrect Saturday Pickup Fees
- Incorrect Large Package Surcharges
- Discrepancies in International / Customs Fee
- Inapplicable Additional Delivery Fee
- Incorrect Proof-of-Delivery Fee
- Incorrect Domestic Dimensional Fee
- Incorrect International Dimensional Fee
- Incorrect Duties & Taxes
- Wrongly-Applied Pickup Fees
- Wrongly-Applied On-Demand Pickup Fees
- Incorrect Package Reroute Charges
- Duplicate Charge
Other Billing Errors
- Missing Discounts
- Incorrect Discounts
- Misapplied Incentives
- Entered Weight / Billed Weight
- Void Shipments
- Discrepancies in Calculation of Zone Jumping
- Incorrect Combined Weight (CWT) / Multweight (MWT) Shipments
- Discrepancies in Insured & Declared Value
- Incorrect Weight
- Discrepancies in Calculation of Rebates
- Incorrect Application of GRI
- Incorrect Application of Revenue-Based Thresholds
- Duplicate Tracking Number
- Duplicate Invoice
- Missing Account Number
- Invalid Account Number
- Incorrect Shipper Billed
- Misapplied Payments
- Incorrect Exchange Rates
You could manually claim refunds for the service failures of your shipping carrier, or you could make use of an automated algorithm-based service to do so. Here’s why the latter is the better option.
Manual Filing of Refund Claims a Hassle
While shipping carriers allow you to file claims manually, they are not exactly a viable option as they are subject to certain limitations.
- It is a tiresome process – Identifying and submitting claims manually is a process that takes up significant time and effort on your end.
- It is expensive – The resource cost of claiming refunds is so expensive that you will spend more to get a refund than the compensation you are entitled to receive.
- Short eligibility window – Manual claim submission is a tedious process. It might take more than five days to obtain a refund for a single package. Also, refund claims are honored by carriers only if they are filed within a short eligibility window, which can be a problem when submitting multiple claims.
- It is error-prone – A positive outcome is not guaranteed for manual claim submission as the communication process with shipping carriers is often inefficient.
For this reason, it is best to use a parcel audit solution like LateShipment.com to claim shipping refunds.
How Lateshipment.Com’s Intelligent Parcel Audit and Shipping Refunds Solution Can Help
LateShipment.com’s automated refunds solution effortlessly audits your invoices and helps save up to 20% on your shipping costs. The best part is that it takes less than 2 minutes to set-up and seamlessly integrates with your existing workflow.
- 600+ carriers supported – With customers in over 40 countries, we successfully claim refunds from carriers worldwide.
- Highly-trained algorithms – Our proprietary technology is built in-house with algorithms trained from tracking over 100M parcels.
- Human-backed automation – Our automated claims system is human-backed to ensure that you never miss any refunds.
- Maximum refunds recovery – Apart from common service failures, our systems are built to recover refunds for 50+ carrier errors.
- No upfront cost – Zero out-of-pocket costs for your business. Pay only a part of the refunds claimed.
- Refund claims for previous shipments – We don’t wait for you to ship out packages. Our systems can backtrack up to 45 days and claim refunds even for past shipments.
How you can start claiming refunds right away
It is never too late to start claiming refunds. Every parcel you ship and get billed for by your shipping carrier, you could be losing an opportunity to claim refunds and save up to 20% on your overall shipping cost.
Here’s how easy it is to start claiming refunds:
- Create a LateShipment.com account
- Add your shipping carrier credentials
- That’s it. You’re all set!
Our automated shipping refunds solution:
- Audits your monthly shipping invoices
- Submits refund claims to your carrier(s) on your behalf
- Deposits the refunded amount directly into your account
- Saves up to 20% on your shipping costs
The best part is, it takes less than 2 minutes to see LateShipment.com in action without any change to your existing workflow.
The value we add to businesses is most evident when experienced first-hand. Try LateShipment.com now.
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