A dispatch system or your own contracts with carriers? A decision guide for e-shops

Every growing e-shop faces the same crossroads: negotiate your own contracts with the individual carriers and manage them separately, or choose a single dispatch system that brings the carriers together under one roof? Both approaches have their place – it depends on your shipment volume, the size of your team and how much time you want to devote to administration.

Approach 1: Your own contract with every carrier

This means a separate contract, registration and portal for every carrier (SPS, GLS, Packeta, Slovak Post, DPD…). Here is what that brings:

• More contracts and invoices – one with each carrier separately.
• More systems – logging into different portals, different data formats, manually rewriting data from orders.
• Custom development and maintenance – connecting every carrier to the e-shop, keeping its updates running, handling pickup points and lockers separately.
• Cash-on-delivery administration – manually reconciling payments from each carrier against invoices.

The upside: if you have a large volume and have negotiated your own prices, the rates can be favourable. The downside: the overhead of time, developer costs and support grows with every additional carrier.

Approach 2: A dispatch system (Neoship)

A dispatch system combines carriers, shipment creation, labels, finances and cash on delivery into a single interface. Neoship works in two modes, so it covers both situations:

• Premium – Neoship arranges transport for you through its contracted carriers. You do not need your own contracts; you deal with a single partnership and a single monthly invoice for all carriers, and Neoship handles complaints.
• Basic – if you already have your own contracts, you use them and Neoship serves as a common layer on top for creating shipments, labels and managing dispatch.

What the e-shop gains from this:

• Time savings – bulk parcel creation and label printing instead of rewriting orders for each carrier.
• Cost savings – less development work, a single point of support, less administration and a lower error rate.
• Finances under control – the detailed price of every parcel, the cost of returns, a comparison of carriers.
• Cash on delivery – bulk reconciliation against invoices and SEPA XML export.
• A single integration – plugins for Shoptet, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, connections to Money, POHODA and ERP systems, or a REST API.

A difference customers feel: a unified pickup point map

With your own contracts you have to handle each carrier's pickup points and lockers separately in the cart. Neoship brings a unified map of pickup points and lockers from several carriers directly in the cart – on a single map the customer finds the nearest locker or pickup point among GLS, SPS, Packeta, DPD and Slovak Post. Less clicking, fewer abandoned orders and no separate map development for each courier.

How to decide

• Your own contracts make sense if you have a large volume, negotiated prices and your own team that can handle the integrations and administration of several carriers.
• A dispatch system pays off if you want to save time and money, have a single invoice and keep order in cash on delivery and finances – and do not want to build and maintain your own integrations.
• Neoship covers both: Premium without your own contracts, Basic with your own contracts. So you do not have to decide "all or nothing".