For the last few weeks, I’ve been helping a friend scale his start-up. His company sells its own branded physical product. One of its biggest pain points has been logistics; specifically, shipping companies picking up and delivering products undamaged and on time. If you don’t have room for error, then a small shipping issue can ripple and cause much larger problems.

I’ve dealt with lots of shipping companies, and I saw them make all kinds of crazy mistakes when I was running CCAW. Over the years, I learned a few things:

• Things are going to happen. When they do, learn from them and try to identify ways to prevent them in the future. Document those learnings somewhere.
• Processes for dealing with shipping companies make resolving errors more efficient and help get things back on track faster.
• The cheapest shipping company isn’t always the best choice because you’ll pay for the money you save with time and energy.
• There’s a big difference between small-parcel (e.g., UPS and FedEx) and less-than-truckload (LTL) shipping. LTL is like the wild, wild west. Small-parcel networks are highly tuned systems built by industrial engineers. LTL networks, not so much.
• Check your bills. Overbilling is rampant in the shipping industry.
• Shipping to consumers and small businesses is very different than shipping to warehouses and distribution centers (DC). The latter have lots of products and trucks coming and going, so it’s hard to get a clear answer on the status of a single shipment. If you’re shipping to a warehouse or DC, it’s helpful to understand how the location operates before you ship there. Some require appointments or other extra steps.
• Small-parcel shipping has historically been a duopoly with FedEx and UPS, but that’s changing now with Amazon Shipping and other last-mile service providers.
• The cost to ship to a residential address is very high, which historically has made it prohibitively expensive to ship certain types of products to residences. Amazon Shipping and other service providers are changing this as we speak, though.
• If you’re shipping a material number of packages daily, a central system where you can see the status of all shipments across all carriers and locations is crucial. Separate systems that don’t talk to each other create chaos and make it difficult to scale and run a smooth operation.
• Labeling and preparing shipments properly can help prevent 50% of issues down the road.

That isn’t a comprehensive list, but if you address everything on it, you’ll drastically increase your ability to scale and the chances that you will scale, and you’ll catch and fix issues faster, prevent issues, and save on shipping expenses.