Your carrier adjusts pricing throughout the year. General rate increases, accessorial changes, new surcharges, fuel adjustments. The rate sheet that applied in January is rarely the rate sheet that applies in November.
Most shippers do not know they can do the same. They assume the contract locks them in until renewal, even if they signed last week. It does not. The reason most shippers never reopen pricing is they have no way to know what better pricing would look like.
Your carrier holds 20 years of aggregate pricing data across millions of shippers; you have your own shipping history and the rate card you were handed. That imbalance is where annual parcel spend on your P&L stays larger than it has to be.
The asymmetry is structural, not personal. UPS and FedEx hold their cross-market pricing intelligence at the central pricing-team level. That data set is wider than what any individual shipper sees, and wider than what any individual carrier rep is given. The pricing team uses it to set the boundaries that every account conversation operates inside.
That central function sees every shipment from every customer the carrier has. It knows what discounts other shippers in your industry, volume tier, and zone profile receive.
It knows which accessorial categories have the least visibility and the most carrier margin. It watches the rate increases the competitor announces and responds with surgical precision.
A shipper with $5M in annual spend cannot replicate that view, and a shipper with $50M cannot either. Neither can the carrier rep assigned to either of them. The cross-market data sits one layer above both, and the boundaries of every conversation flow down from it.
When your carrier rep tells you your rates are competitive, they mean it. Carrier reps are measured on retention and account success; their incentives are aligned with the shipper's.
The assessment is accurate within the data the carrier makes available to them. It is not the same statement as saying your rates are competitive against what is actually achievable in the market. The data behind those two statements is not the same.
Shippers who have already negotiated hard are told that rates are at the floor of available discounts. The position is accurate within the constraints the carrier sets for that conversation. The floor inside the carrier's conversation is not the same floor an outside party with cross-market visibility would identify.
A shipping cost analysis is not a rate comparison. Rate comparison asks whether your published rates look reasonable next to other shippers. That comparison is not useful because every contract is heavily customized, and the published rate is almost never the rate either party actually pays.
A line-item analysis works in the opposite direction. It takes your actual invoices and decomposes them shipment by shipment.
Each line shows what the carrier paid to deliver that package, what the carrier charged you for it, and the margin in between. Across a year of shipments, that margin pattern reveals where carrier profitability is concentrated in your specific contract.
ShipSigma runs this analysis against 20 billion shipping data points collected across the customer base. That data set tells the model what is structurally achievable for a shipper with your weight distribution, zone profile, service mix, and accessorial pattern. The output is a dollar figure of identified savings, calculated from your invoices, before any conversation about implementation.
Across 350+ companies served and over $150 million in customer savings delivered, ShipSigma's average parcel cost reduction is 25.2%. That number is the realized result, not a projection. It is calculated from actual invoices after the new contract terms take effect.
The figure reflects an average across a wide range of shipping profiles. Some customers see less, and a handful see considerably more. The number exists because the underlying asymmetry exists at scale, not because any shipper is being mistreated or any rep is doing anything other than their job.
The pattern matters more than the headline number. Customers who arrive certain their rates are already optimized see roughly the same distribution of savings as customers who arrive uncertain. The distribution does not respond to the shipper's confidence level. It responds to the structure of the contract itself.
A PE-backed air filtration products company engaged ShipSigma with a specific premise to test. Their carrier had told them their existing rates were at the floor of available discounts, which matched everything their rep could see. The company wanted that view confirmed against a wider data set before their next contract round.
Within 48 hours of gaining access to the invoice data, the cost analysis identified over $250,000 in annualized savings. ShipSigma then ran the carrier contract negotiation, secured new terms with the existing carrier, and continued managing tier monitoring, mode optimization, and contract compliance for the duration of the new agreement.
Three-year realized savings on that engagement exceeded $775,000. The carrier relationship remained intact. The company did not change service levels or operating procedures. The rep's starting position was accurate within the data they had; the cross-market analysis showed three-quarters of a million dollars sitting beyond it.
Three steps. Most analyses complete within days, not weeks.
The shipper provides recent UPS or FedEx invoice files, which most companies have available in a downloadable format from the carrier portal. ShipSigma handles the rest of the ingestion and normalization.
ShipSigma's cost modeling decomposes the invoices, identifies the patterns that correlate with the savings opportunity, and produces a dollar figure specific to the shipper, drawn entirely from their own data.
The shipper sees the identified savings figure before any contract or commitment exists. If the figure is meaningful and the shipper wants to engage, ShipSigma's fee is structured as a share of savings delivered, not as a flat retainer. No savings, no fee.
The free analysis is bounded by what it does and does not touch. Three things specifically.
The analysis does not contact your carrier. ShipSigma functions as an extension of your team; the shipper remains the named party in every carrier conversation. Nothing in the data access process changes your service levels, your routing, your existing contract, or your day-to-day operations.
The carrier the shipper already uses stays in place. ShipSigma re-engineers the existing contract, then continues to monitor carrier pricing actions, tier compliance, and accessorial changes throughout the contract term, renegotiating against them as they arise. The carrier relationship becomes stronger because the contract becomes one both sides understand at the line-item level.
The free analysis is the entry point to an ongoing partnership, not a one-and-done deliverable. ShipSigma's cost modeling runs against new invoice activity for the duration of the agreement, and the team handles tier shortfalls, accessorial drift, and pricing changes that warrant going back to the carrier.
The pattern shows up most consistently in privately held or PE-backed companies spending between $1 million and $100 million annually on UPS and FedEx combined. Below $1 million, the savings opportunity exists but the engagement economics work less cleanly. Above $100 million, the analysis still works, though the company is at a size that warrants a different conversation entirely.
The strongest fit also includes one of the following conditions:
Public companies fit less cleanly because performance-based pricing structures conflict with their preference for fixed, predictable costs. Large enterprises with dedicated logistics procurement teams also fit less cleanly. Mid-market financial buyers carrying the parcel line item on their P&L without a dedicated specialist see the strongest results.
The carrier asymmetry is structural and durable. Every year a shipper waits, the gap between what the contract delivers and what the contract could deliver widens by the size of the next general rate increase. The cost of waiting is not theoretical. It is the difference between the savings figure available now and the savings figure available a year from now, after another GRI has compounded onto the base.
Mid-market shippers were not negligent for signing the contract they signed, and their carrier reps were not withholding anything. Both negotiated with the data they had, and most got reasonable outcomes by that standard. The question is whether the contract still reflects what is achievable in the current market. The only way to know is to run the invoices through a cost model with the cross-market visibility no carrier rep has the data to provide.