Real-Time Carrier Allocation for Merchants
Brian Whalley, Co-Founder of Wonderment, on Klaviyo's product-market fit
Using four or five carriers is a sign that shipping has become a routing and procurement problem, not just a warehouse task. A larger merchant may send a West Coast order with OnTrac, an East Coast order with LaserShip, and a national fallback through UPS or USPS, depending on destination, package weight, promised delivery date, and negotiated rates. That is why post purchase software becomes valuable, because someone has to unify tracking, costs, and exceptions across all those handoffs.
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Regional carriers gained traction because merchants were trying to cut parcel costs and avoid capacity limits from the national networks. LaserShip expanded across Tennessee in 2021 as retailers faced higher delivery costs and tighter capacity, then merged with OnTrac in late 2021 to create a broader alternative for ecommerce delivery.
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The merchant workflow gets messy fast. A brand may ship from multiple warehouses, buy labels through its own carrier contracts or through a 3PL, and then compare very different prices for the same package. That makes carrier analytics useful, because the savings come from choosing the right carrier lane by lane, not from loyalty to one provider.
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This is also why multicarrier infrastructure companies matter. Fulfillment networks like ShipBob and shipping APIs like EasyPost and Shippo are converging on the same problem, giving merchants one layer to buy labels, route parcels, and monitor deliveries across several carriers instead of stitching each carrier relationship together by hand.
The next step is more software driven carrier allocation. As regional networks expand and more merchants mix warehouse nodes with multiple parcel partners, the winning stack will decide in real time which carrier should handle each order, then feed that data into customer messaging, support, and margin management.