Mail Consolidator

Mail Consolidator

A mail or shipping consolidator is a shipping company that picks up parcels for shipment from multiple customers, sorts them according to USPS major shipping hubs, and processes them for final delivery by USPS system. Mail consolidators enable companies to streamline their shipping process and reduce shipping costs.

Here’s how: shipping consolidators pick up smaller groups of shipments from multiple different companies and combine them into larger loads that qualify for lower shipping rates. The consolidator can share the savings with their clients, whose volumes are too small to access these discounts.

Mail consolidators can also reduce the company’s time and labor dedicated to shipping operations. The mail consolidator’s staff typically handles the tasks of picking up, sorting, and documenting parcels, freeing up the company staff from these labor-intensive tasks. Consolidators may also provide add-on services such as USPS tracking capabilities and insurance.

When to Use a Consolidator

For outbound shipping: consolidation can be an effective cost-saving for companies that ship high volumes of small packages of 5 pounds or less to consumers. The total delivery time may be slightly longer than the transit times offered by a small parcel carrier service. Still, the delay is often no more than a day or two, depending on the destination’s distance from a hub. Significant freight savings can be realized if these delivery dates are acceptable to customers.

For many companies, mail consolidation services work well for some, but not all of their shipments. This can be solved by using multi-carrier parcel shipping software to automatically sort parcels based on parameters set up in the software’s business rules. Once these business rules are embedded into the shipping software to be automatically applied during shipment processing, the shipping process is quick, efficient and reduces shipping and labor costs.

Learn More

Blog: Four Proven Ways to Reduce Shipping Costs

Contact us if you’d like to discuss the benefits of mail consolidators and other ways to reduce shipping costs to your warehouse.

CLS has worked with many companies to reduce domestic and international shipping costs, streamline shipping processes and reduce labor needs in the warehouse through the combination of streamlined workflows integrated with its InfoShip®/Vx  multi-carrier shipping software solutions, e-commerce shipping software, integrated pack/ship stations, data collection solutions and more.