"Our Shipping Costs are Fine..." and Other Expensive Assumptions
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You negotiated what you thought were great carrier rates. Your operations team isn’t flagging issues. Finance hasn’t raised any alarms.
So you assume everything’s running fine—and that shipping is a necessary cost of doing business. One you’ve already optimized.
But here’s the truth:
Most businesses overpay for shipping not because they’re careless—but because they’re confident. Confident in their contracts. Confident in their processes. Confident that if there were real issues, someone would have spotted them.
At Intelligent Audit, we see this mindset over and over. And we see what it costs.
Here are five common myths that keep companies locked into overpayment, inefficiency, and missed opportunity.
Myth #1: “If no one’s complaining, everything’s working fine.”
Reality: Silence isn’t savings.
Just because your customers aren’t complaining (a lot) and your ops team isn’t sounding alarms doesn’t mean you’re not bleeding cash. Most overpayment happens quietly—through avoidable fees, misused service levels, or unclaimed refunds that never make it back to your bottom line.
Myth #2: “We negotiated great rates—we’re good.”
Reality: Great rates don’t guarantee great outcomes.
Too many businesses mistake strong contract negotiations for long-term cost control. But even the most aggressive rates can be undercut by poor routing, accessorials, and lack of execution oversight. If you’re not actively validating contract compliance or optimizing service selection in real time, those “great rates” are really just a mirage.
Myth #3: “My team would catch issues if they were major.”
Reality: Even your best people are limited by lack of end-to-end visibility.
Modern shipping spans carriers, systems, regions, and modes. Without a centralized view, your team may only see the tip of the iceberg. The true savings—and risks—lie in the cross-patterns and anomalies that human eyes and siloed reports miss.
Myth #4: “Refunds aren't worth the effort.”
Reality: If you’re not claiming refunds automatically, you’re funding your carrier’s margin.
Many organizations accept missed delivery guarantees or late shipments as “just part of the game”—especially during peak or across multiple zones. But those missed refunds add up fast.
Myth #5: “Shipping is a fixed cost we can't change.”
Reality: Shipping isn’t a fixed cost. It’s a strategic lever.
Treating shipping as a static line item—one that can’t be optimized beyond contracts—keeps you from unlocking real margin improvement. In reality, shipping is one of the few operational levers you can continuously refine through mode selection, carrier mix, packaging, return routing, and more.
The Bottom Line
Most organizations aren’t underperforming because of a lack of effort. They’re underperforming because they’re operating on assumptions. That good rates mean good outcomes. That no news means no problems. That shipping spend is as optimized as it can get.
Catalyst exists to challenge those assumptions—with intelligent automation and connected clarity.
