Brands Move to Multi-Carrier Orchestration
Brian Whalley, Co-Founder of Wonderment, on Klaviyo's product-market fit
This shift turns parcel shipping from a fixed back office choice into an active margin lever. Large merchants increasingly split volume across several carriers by region, warehouse, and package type, because a regional carrier can be cheaper or faster on a specific lane than a national carrier. That creates more operational complexity, but it gives brands better delivery performance, lower label costs, and more negotiating power with both carriers and 3PLs.
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In practice, this means a merchant might use one carrier on the West Coast, another on the East Coast, and a different service for lightweight parcels. The same order can become materially cheaper to ship if it is routed through the right regional network instead of defaulting to FedEx or UPS everywhere.
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The rise of carriers like OnTrac and LaserShip came from this exact need. Their networks were built around dense regional coverage, and their 2022 combination created a broader U.S. ecommerce footprint, giving merchants another scaled option beyond the two legacy national carriers.
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Software becomes more valuable as carrier count rises. Once a brand uses three to five carriers, it needs one place to see delays, returns, and delivery performance across all of them, otherwise support teams end up clicking through separate tracking pages and reacting after customers complain.
The next phase is carrier orchestration. More brands will treat shipping the way they treat paid marketing, with constant routing, pricing, and performance optimization across providers. That favors tools that unify carrier data and favors regional networks that can win specific lanes, not just the biggest national contracts.