Long Distance Carriers and Shorter Distance Carriers
One of the problems that always arises as soon as you set up a business selling to the rest of the world is how you are going to get your goods to your customer? Do you need long distance carriers such as ANC, APC, Initial City Linking, DHL, FedEx, Amtrak and ParcelForce?
In order to find out how much easier our TOPS software can make it for you to work with long distance carriers, please see our presentation.
Apart from ANC, APC, Initial City Linking, DHL, FedEx, Amtrak or ParcelForce delivering occasional parcels to your own door, your experience of using carriers may be limited to visiting your local Post Office and using Royal Mail and no more! You may even have used ParcelForce to send your annual Christmas gift to your brother in Australia. But now you may need to look at these other long distance carriers for your business and you realise there is a lot to learn out there - are your goods time-sensitive like food - and do you need to consider customs too? - a veritable minefield!
For example you may be trying to send parcels to Ireland. Concentrating on the main carriers such as ANC, APC, Initial City Linking, Royal Mail, DHL, FedEx, Amtrak and ParcelForce, be they long distance carriers for Europe, USA or ROW (Rest of the World), or short distance carriers for within the UK, how do they classify Northern Ireland / Eire? Often Ireland suddenly becomes "Europe" with some carriers!
Not only do ANC, APC, Initial City Linking, DHL, FedEx, Amtrak, and ParcelForce give you a signature service with traceability but they can provide you with their software on your own computer to produce those rather garish labels with bar codes - which works alongside our TOPS software - reducing one of those nasty bottlenecks that can easily build up when the airway bills / dockets / labels have to be prepared by hand. This makes working with the long distance carriers very easy.
For some long distance carriers - DHL, FedEx and ParcelForce - you may even have to provide special invoices for processing your goods through customs - once again with TOPS interfacing with these long distance carriers' software, this is another odious chore that is automatically processed within our system - what a relief!
|
