Running a total landed cost comparison

A landed cost comparison done on rate cards will confirm whatever you already believe. Done on your own billed invoices, it regularly reverses the ranking. Here is the method.

Start from billed amounts, not quoted rates

Rate cards describe intentions. Your invoices describe what happened, including accessorials, fuel, brokerage and duty as assessed.

Pull three months of shipments and three months of carrier invoices, and join them on tracking number. Everything downstream depends on this join being clean.

Build the per-order cost

For each shipment, sum label, fuel, accessorials, customs entry fees and duty. That is the real cost of moving that order.

Record the lane, the weight, the destination region and the order value alongside it, because those are the dimensions the answer varies on.

Compare on segments, not averages

An average cost per order across all lanes hides the thing you are looking for. Segment by weight band and order value band, then compare lanes inside each segment.

Expect the winner to change between segments. If it does not, you either have a very narrow product mix or a join problem in your data.

Include the duty outcome explicitly

Separate duty from fees and look at whether qualifying goods were charged duty on each lane. A lane that costs two dollars less per label and loses a nine-dollar CUSMA claim is not cheaper.

This is the step most comparisons omit, and it is the one most likely to change the decision.

LaneWise runs this on your own data and returns routing rules rather than a recommendation, because the answer is a set of thresholds, not a carrier name.