Carrier Selection

Carrier selection is the decision point where a shipper picks which carrier will move a given load. It sounds simple, but for shippers with dozens of carrier relationships across multiple modes and lanes, it's one of the most consequential decisions made on every shipment – affecting cost, service, and risk simultaneously.

The inputs to carrier selection include contracted rates, spot market rates, transit time commitments, historical on-time performance, claims ratios, equipment availability, and any lane-specific requirements like temperature control or liftgate service. In structured environments, a routing guide dictates the preferred carrier hierarchy for each lane. In practice, many mid-market shippers still rely on relationship-based decisions, gut instinct, or whoever answers the phone first – leaving significant cost and service improvements on the table.

Poor carrier selection compounds. Choosing a low-cost carrier with a history of late deliveries can trigger detention charges, missed retail delivery windows, and OTIF penalties that far exceed the rate savings. Conversely, always defaulting to a premium carrier when a reliable mid-tier option exists inflates freight spend unnecessarily.

The modern approach is data-driven carrier selection: comparing contract rates, spot rates, and LTL tariffs side-by-side while factoring in each carrier's actual performance history on the specific lane. This gives the logistics team a recommendation grounded in data while preserving their ability to override based on context the algorithm can't see – like a known capacity crunch or a carrier relationship that matters strategically.