FedEx called me the other day and told me they wanted my business back
I told them for the right price, anything is possible. I can't say how much the discount is due to the terms of the agreement, but basically they came up with an offer somewhere between 9% and 11% off published rates for Home Delivery (80% of my shipping)

Can anyone who has dealt with UPS or FedEx for longer than two years tell me if that is a halfway decent offer? I think I am going to counter the rep with 40% to 50% off just to be ridiculous and see what they come back with, if anything.
I always learned that if you aren't embarrassed, you didn't make a low enough offer.

I am in no hurry to make the switch, and it will cost me some money in programming to set it up the way I want it.

Any post or PM's would be awesome!
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

The discount rate depends on the volume you ship ($$$ amount, I believe).

Our discount rate comes from association membership, and we need to pay megabucks in association dues to get the discount, so it really doesn't apply to your case.

I think you did good.

Yeah like bookmark said it depends on how many packages a day and week you send. If you send very little that is a very good deal. As for 40/50% of home delivery I really really doubt it. Discounts like that are for the big boys for ground and home delivery.

As said above, all discounts are volume based. Are their other shippers located close by you could form a negotiating block with? Assoc. you can join? How about major suppliers that will bring you in under their plan (carrier will hate this and fight it up front, but it can be done if the supplier will help you). etc., etc.

As far as negotiating, you might be able to get one past them for 3-6mo, maybe even a year. But after that the discount is gone as soon as they realize you'll never provide the volume they hoped to lock in by giving you the big discount. The other thing is that their discount authority is tiered. I suspect 10% (maybe it's 15-20% who knows) is all a rep can offer on his own. Above that his manager can go maybe twice what the rep can. Deep discounts require district mgr. approval.

I know that when negotiating for businesses where I ran Logistics, I got the big discounts you were talking. (We actually negotiated a deeper one and gave back a few percent to get other services we wanted, like late trailer pickup, etc.) However, I can't imagine anyone on having enough volume alone to get that leverage.

Good luck.
Ed

You will not see a MAJOR discount on FedEx home or Ground since that is the cut throat bread and butter but they will do something over UPS, They will talk much bigger on Air however and in some cases you can use the Express Saver ( 3 day) in place of ground for almost the same prices.
Also if you do International they will again talk nice discounts.

Again all this depends on volume but they will at least talk.
Also try for a year of averages that way if you have highs and lows they still only look at the whole picture to be fair.

They begged, discounted and even installed a complete shipping computer system with feeds from/to Dataport in addition to discounts.
UPS wouldnt discuss much, so they lost out on the bulk of our shipping.