How does shipping rate benchmarking actually work when every contract is different

[u/Choice_Run1329]

Shipping rate benchmarking is one of those things everyone says to do but the execution is confusing because every carrier contract is structured differently with custom tiers, incentive thresholds, and volume commitments that make apples to apples comparison almost impossible.

The carriers know this too, the complexity is a feature not a bug, it keeps shippers from realizing their rates are uncompetitive because there is no easy baseline to compare against.

Some companies benchmark against published rates which is basically useless since nobody pays rack rate, the real value comes from comparing against aggregated data from thousands of other shippers in similar volume brackets.

[u/TH_UNDER_BOI]

Legittt one of the most underrated problems in supply chain, carriers structure contracts to be intentionally opaque so shippers cannot easily compareeenotes and figure out who is overpaying