We changed carriers live, with no IT ticket. Here's what that looks like.

Before the session I wrote that most retailers can name every carrier in their network, then go quiet when you ask how fast they could move volume off one of them if it dropped below SLA next week. Today Greg Mannix and I stopped talking about that gap and worked through it live in the nShift platform.

The format of Solved is the same every time: a real scenario, solved on screen in real time. This episode followed the conversations we kept having at Delivery Europe, where the same theme came up regardless of sector or size. Delivery networks are getting more complex, and the teams that cope best are the ones that can change how they ship without waiting on a project.

"Having multiple carriers isn't the goal. Having control over them is."

That line from Greg's close is the whole session in one sentence. Choice gets the carriers onto the platform. Control is what you do with them when conditions change.

Key takeaways in one glance

• Adding a new carrier service, including ship-from-store, is a few clicks and self-serve. No IT project.
• Allocation is rule-based. Split volume across carriers with sliders that always total 100%, and set conditions by weight, postcode, and region.
• The rules run automatically at booking. An order pre-allocated to one carrier reroutes the moment the rules find that carrier is not eligible for the lane.
• Carrier performance, customer experience, and trend data sit in Track, so decisions run on evidence rather than anecdotes.
• The same business user who owns the rules can change them in real time.
• Existing carrier contracts and accounts carry straight over.

The setup: carrier choice, but not carrier control

We ran the session through a fictional retailer, Weather Warriors, growing quickly across Europe with multiple carriers, different service levels, and different customer promises by market. On paper they have plenty of delivery options. In practice the operations team spends more time reacting than controlling: performance varies by region, costs drift, and every change feels like it needs a ticket.

The data we opened with matched what we heard at the event. 31% of shippers say integration complexity stops them adding new carrier services, even when a faster or cheaper option exists. 76% of European shippers hit supply chain or transport disruption in the past year. That pressure to adapt is constant. Most setups just can't act on it fast enough.

So we picked three moments where that shows up and solved each one on screen.

1. Add a carrier service without an IT project

The first challenge was a common one: Weather Warriors want to launch ship-from-store, and they need the service live quickly.

I started in Ship, in the configuration area we call actors and carriers. An actor is simply a level in your setup. It can be a region, a market, a warehouse, or an individual store, which gives you the freedom to design carrier connectivity around how the business actually runs. Adding a service to an existing actor took a few clicks: open the carrier, see what is activated against what is available on the account, tick the new product, and finish.

Standing up the store was just as quick. Rather than build a new location from scratch, I duplicated the existing distribution centre setup, renamed it for ship-from-store, and the platform recreated a fresh actor with the same carriers underneath it. From there it was a case of adding the store address and, where a carrier needs different account credentials for the new location, dropping those in. The store was ready to ship without a development cycle behind it.

This is the part Proshop know well. Shipping across seven European markets and up to 30,000 orders on a peak day, their Head of Logistics, Ronnie Stormfeldt, put it like this:

"Before using nShift, we had direct links to our carriers, which were APIs. But creating and enhancing those links was time-consuming. With nShift, it's easy. We don't have to spend any time coding ourselves. We just say, 'We need a new carrier link so we can expand into this country,' and it's done."

2. Let the rules choose the carrier, in real time

A connected carrier still has to be chosen. The shipping rules are where that choice gets made, and that was the second challenge: with several carriers offering similar services, how do you control selection without picking manually?

Inside the rules, service levels mirror what you offer at checkout: standard, next day, a time slot, a pickup point. Under each one, you choose how volume is allocated across the carriers that can serve it. In distribution mode, a set of sliders splits the traffic, and they always add up to 100% however you move them, whether you are balancing two carriers or seven. If a carrier starts struggling in peak, you can slide its share down, even to zero, and reload. The change is live.

You don't always want to switch a carrier off completely, though, because the problem is often local rather than total. So before allocation, you can set conditions on a carrier: a weight band, or a receiver condition such as a postcode range. You can upload postcode files for things like highlands and islands, and you can use a range as an include or an exclude. If a carrier underperforms in a specific area, you exclude that range and orders for those postcodes simply stop going to it, while the rest of the network is untouched.

Then we tested it. I took an order the website had pre-allocated to one carrier and pushed it through booking. Because that carrier wasn't eligible under the live rule set, the platform reassigned the order to the next valid carrier automatically. The rules read the conditions, checked whether the first carrier was available for that lane, found it wasn't, and moved on. No one touched it.

That governed, rule-driven setup is what sits behind operational gains like JYSK, who unified label printing, shipment automation, and carrier integrations on Ship and made their picking process 40% more efficient across a multi-market operation.

3. See where a carrier is slipping, and act on it

The third challenge keeps carrier decisions honest: how do you know when a carrier is falling behind, and when to act on it? For that I moved into Track and the insights reports.

Carrier performance measures each carrier against your contracted SLA. You set where the clock starts, whether that is at manifest, at label production, or at first scan, and the service dictates where it ends. The report splits deliveries three ways: too early, within SLA, and too late. Too early counts as a failure too, because on a day-definite service an early delivery still misses the promise. The middle band should always be the lion's share. The late band on the right is the one to watch, and you can drill from the chart down to individual orders and parcels to see where a journey went wrong.

Customer experience takes the same carriers and overlays the parts of the journey an SLA alone misses. A parcel can land inside contract and still break the experience. This view gives you a first-time delivery success rate and an exceptions breakdown: carded deliveries, failed attempts, refusals at the door, no property access, insufficient address, misrouted, damaged, lost, and network delays. The exceptions are where the decisions are. In the demo, a high share of failures sitting under "damaged" was a signal that the product range may not be a good fit for that carrier, or that something needs to change in the carrier mix. A spike in "insufficient address" points back to what is captured at checkout and passed to the carrier.

Carrier performance trend lines carriers up side by side over time, day by day or month by month. It's the view carrier managers take into a renegotiation, because it turns "we think you slipped in Q2" into a chart both sides can read.

The questions you asked

We had more questions than we could answer live, so here are the ones that came up most, with the answers from the session. (We have kept attendees anonymous.)

Does the service list show only what we are contracted for, or everything a carrier offers?
It shows every product and service the carrier offers, not only what you're currently contracted for, so you can see the full range available to activate.

With the postcode file upload, can we see the file after it is loaded?
Yes. In the panel where the file loads, you can view the active file and the postcodes or zip codes it contains.

If allocation has several carriers in play, can the tool then pick the cheapest?
Yes. In the allocation section you can choose a mode other than distribution, such as cheapest price or fastest option, so the rule optimises for cost or speed across the eligible carriers.

How do you handle carrier-specific requirements, like dangerous goods data or delivery instructions?
Those fields are available to populate, typically through the API, and they also appear in the interface. In the demo we did not scroll far enough to show them, but the fields that carry delivery instructions and similar carrier requirements are there in the UI.

Can every carrier be configured through self-service?
Once a carrier is enabled, yes, you can set it up yourself. When you're adding a brand-new carrier to your setup, some are fully self-service and others need a quick activation on our side, depending on what that carrier's setup requires.

If you only do one thing from this session

Open your carrier performance report and look at the late band, then ask whether you could move volume away from the worst performer this week without raising a ticket. If the answer is no, that is the gap to close.

Everything we showed today happened in real time, run by a business user, with no IT dependency in the room. That's the difference between holding a list of carriers and running a delivery operation that keeps moving when conditions change.

Watch the full walkthrough on demand: Solved Episode 4: Multi-carrier control. And if you want to talk through your own carrier strategy, reach out to your nShift contact and we will pick up the conversation.