Carrier rates went up again this year. They'll go up again next year. FedEx and UPS have raised rates for three straight years, and once surcharges are factored in, the real increase for most shippers runs 8% to 12%. That's well above the 5.9% headline. That part of the story is true, but when it comes to protecting your margin, it's not the end of the story. In the face of unavoidable carrier rate hikes, it's more important than ever to have up-to-date, reliable data to inform your shipping and service selection decisions.

Carrier rates rise the same way for every shipper in a given lane, but claim exposure varies by service level, delivery address, and routing choices a shipper controls. High-value shippers who monitor their own claims data continuously — rather than reviewing it once — catch risk drift before it becomes a pattern of losses.

Most Shippers Are Operating on Instinct

Ask a shipper which service level produces the most claims, and most will answer with their gut instinct: probably the cheap one, probably the slow one. Sometimes that's right, but not always. UPS Next Day Air Saver runs a claim rate nearly three times higher than standard Next Day Air, despite identical delivery windows. FedEx Home Delivery runs at seven times the claim rate of FedEx Priority Overnight. Guessing gets the extremes right and the middle tier wrong.

A hypothetical: a high-value shipper had split shipments across two service tiers for over a year based on what felt fastest at checkout, not what their own claims data supported. Nobody had looked, because nothing about the shipping process suggested there was anything to find. A single afternoon reviewing claims by service level and destination surfaced the loss pattern. The fix cost nothing, but the year of unnecessary claim exposure did.

The Data Doesn't Hold Still

The key to unlocking a solid shipping strategy is understanding that claim rates change in both the short and long term. Carriers adjust networks, routes shift, and a service level that was low-risk last year can become higher-risk this year. A shipper who reviews their routing once and locks it in is optimizing for a risk picture that's already out of date by the time the next quarter closes.

That's why shipping is not a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. Because risk varies over time as well as by route, speed, etc., it requires constant data monitoring, someone to catch anomalies before they become a costly pattern. Depending on the transportation management system, shippers may not have the visibility they need to spot changes in risk. Most insurance providers aren't set up to do it for them, because they only see the shipment after something has already gone wrong and they're processing a claim.

Why That's the Reason to Choose Cabrella

This is why high-value shippers work with Cabrella. It isn't about rates or even about paying claims quickly, though we do both. It's that we collect and monitor one of the more detailed sets of carrier claims data in the industry, we watch it change, and we use it to tell clients things about their own shipping that they wouldn't otherwise know until a loss forced the question. What's more, we give clients full visibility into their own data. Label generation, insurance, and data analysis all live in our API-driven platform. One login, all your workflows and data.

Insurance still matters. When something goes wrong, all-risk coverage paid at invoice value is what keeps that loss from becoming a margin problem. But insurance is the backstop. The data is the advantage.

The full data set — rate trends, claim rates by carrier and service level, and what to actually do with that information — is in our latest report.

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