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How to Negotiate Freight Rates

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How to Reduce Freight Rates

Freight rate reductions use logistics steps to insure your maximum profit to least shipping expenditures. This very complex process involves many various logistics for tracking and receiving of freight information or benchmarking. Freight reductions always occur when management maintains an accurate log of freight purchasing freight types and client needs of the freight at destination. Due to the complexity of freight transport, no two deals will be the same and need individual logistics study.


  1. Know your client’s demands. One of the easiest ways to reduce freight costs insure your client needs the high priced shipping you pay without fail. If you consistently use air shipping when ground or sea shipping is accepted, change your shipping schedule immediately. 

  2. Order placement in your manufacturing department. Detail an audit of your manufacturing delays may cause additional shipping costs since sales may pressure your distributions people to place orders on urgent ship rising costs and expenditures. If your manufacturing department can overcome certain delays, the shipping may be carried out more effectively.

  3. Maintain a detailed logbook and data set of all shipping transactions for cost control and logistics benchmarking. Often going to negotiate shipping costs if you can show a repeated shipping at a specific bulk with the same type of cargo on specific dates and guarantee shipments for six months the shipping company will offer reduced rates. These saving can be substantial depending on the shipping amount and type of cargo.

  4. Analyze all of your past bills for additional charges set up more logistics tables to counteract these charges. Freight arriving at destination in the late evening needing additional security guards and nighttime delivery to storage facility. Freight arrives at destination country during holidays or other religious functions. Freight arrives at the wrong port or city and requires additional shipping and transportation fees to get to actual store destinations. Shipments crossing paths and duplicating orders. All of these scenarios can be eliminated or reduced with logistics data management and management engineering.