Green Mountain’s 2026 Benchmark Report is now live, and it shines a light on what organizations with $1 billion-plus in revenue care about most in parcel.
Top priorities included:
Read the items on that list separately, and they look like three different problems: a finance problem, a procurement problem, and an operations problem. And most companies staff them that way.
But those three items are actually one problem showing up in different ways: shipping decisions made too late in the order cycle to change the outcome, an unexpected rate you discover on a carrier invoice, a carrier service mix you rebalance once a year, and a service level chosen too late in the fulfillment process (in shipping) to have a measurable impact on savings.
The shippers pulling ahead are the ones moving the decisions further upstream, where all three priorities get solved at once. Here’s a deeper dive into each of these three priorities and how large-scale shippers can find solutions.
The report’s top finding is blunt. For organizations with more than $1 billion in revenue, budget predictability and stability now outrank every other parcel priority (even ahead of diversification and speed).
That tells you something about what the last 2 years have done to shipping budgets.
The annual GRI used to be the number you planned around. You suited up for tough negotiations. You (thought) you understood the hard-fought rates. Then organizations would simply absorb the increase, adjust the budget, and move on. But the GRI has become the calm surface of a much more turbulent pricing environment.
According to the report, national carriers have made a combined 31 mid-year service guide changes since 2024, all outside the annual GRI cycle. Those changes include new delivery area surcharge ZIP codes, redefined cubic-volume thresholds, and surcharges that used to be seasonal, now running year-round.
None of those appear in the January rate announcement, but all of them show up on the invoice.
The result is a widening gap between what shippers expect to pay and what they’re actually billed. The report puts numbers on it: 43% of shippers saw parcel cost inflation of 3–5% in 2025, and 55% expect another 3%+ increase in 2026. When more than half of large shippers are budgeting for inflation they can’t trace to a single announced increase, “cost reduction” stops being the goal. Instead, shippers are focusing on simply knowing what they’ll actually spend.
That’s margin erosion by a thousand cuts, and it explains why this issue is No. 1 on Green Mountain’s list.
The shippers staying ahead are vigilant and constantly keep rate models current instead of rebuilding them once a year. They pair those models with business rules designed to catch surcharge triggers before the label prints (not after the invoice lands). And they apply both across the entire order-to-invoice cycle: at the cart, at allocation, at packing, and yes at shipping carrier selection.
The Sendflex Solution: Sendflex simulation modeling powered by a high speed rating engine enables shippers to gain insights into how to more accurately predict costs, using rules to avoid unexpected surcharges and fees. Sendflex can then operationalize those insights by embedding optimization processes throughout the order to invoice life cycle.
Carrier network diversification and right-sizing ranked second in the report, just behind budget predictability. The two are more connected than the ranking suggests.
If Priority 1 is about mid-year pricing changes you didn’t see coming, Priority 2 is about your exposure when they arrive. Single-carrier concentration means every service guide change falls on your entire network at once. Diversification has become a hedge — and shippers are acting on it.
According to the report, 48% are using or considering alternative carriers. In retail, where speed and localized delivery matter most, that figure climbs to 61%. Healthcare sits at the other end at just 25%, which makes sense: When chain-of-custody and compliance are on the line, flexibility takes a back seat to certainty.
Here’s where most of the industry conversation goes wrong, though.
Diversification is not about abandoning the national carriers. It can’t be, because the combined capacity of every regional carrier in the country doesn’t come close to matching the enormous scale of the top nationals. For most shippers, a primary national carrier will remain the foundation of their delivery network.
The opportunity lives at the margins. When a national carrier’s economics shift on a specific slice of your volume, through a weight band adjustment, a zone-based pricing change, or a service level restructuring, an alternative carrier can win that slice on cost.
Diversification should be surgical, because diversification done carelessly can actually cost more than it saves. National carrier contracts are built on volume commitments, incentive tiers, and negotiated discounts. Migrate too much volume away, and you can break the thresholds that made the primary relationship economically valuable in the first place. The savings on the diverted shipments get wiped out by the discounts lost on everything else.
The shippers doing this well treat it as an applied intelligence and math problem. The right approach is different for every contract, and it changes whenever the economics change.
The Sendflex Solution: Sendflex supports an extensive network of final mile carriers and monitors relative volumes and spend in real time. It enables shippers to configure rules to ensure no alternative carrier services are used until incentive tier levels are achieved.
Faster order cycle time rounds out the top three priorities in the Green Mountain report. It’s important to know that “cycle time” means “click to delivery” — the complete time span from the moment an order is placed to the moment it arrives.
That framing changes the problem. Carrier transit is just one segment of that span, and it’s the segment shippers control least and pay the most to compress. Everything before the truck (order processing, allocation, packing, carrier selection, dock time) is where cycle time is actually won or lost.
At the same time, customer expectations keep raising the stakes. Capital One data cited in the report show that 74% of online shoppers now expect delivery within 2 days, and 92% factor delivery windows directly into their buying decisions.
But “faster” is not a universal mandate.
Healthcare respondents concentrate almost entirely within the 1- to 2-day window. Time-definite delivery is non-negotiable when there are lives on the other end of the shipment. Retail and B2B/Wholesale skew toward 3 to 5 days, balancing speed against cost. Technology and services show the most tolerance for longer windows.
That means a blanket push toward same-day may be a mistake in some segments of the market. A healthcare shipper that underinvests in speed risks patients. A B2B wholesaler over-investing in it is burning margin on a promise nobody asked for.
The lesson is to segment cycle time strategy by what your customers actually need, then compress the parts of the cycle you own. An order that sits in processing for a day before anyone selects a carrier has already lost more time than a premium service can make up. Shaving hours from order processing, carrier selection, and dock-to-truck is usually cheaper than paying a carrier to shave those same hours in transit.
The Sendflex Solution: Sendflex’s high-speed optimization engine processes millions of rates and routing rules per second, opening the door to faster shopping cart, order fulfillment and shipping processes. Predictive delivery logic ensure delivery promises are kept.
Look back at where each priority pointed:
Those are three priorities with one root cause: decisions made too late in the order cycle to change the outcome. Which is why one platform can address all three. Sendflex was purpose-built to move those decisions upstream.
On budget predictability, Sendflex works in three layers:
On diversification, Sendflex’s multi-carrier rate shopping and onboarding tools make it practical to add regional and alternative carriers and right-size volume by weight band, zone, or service level without adding headcount. And the surgical part gets handled by the platform rather than a spreadsheet: Sendflex monitors your incentive tier targets throughout optimization and shipping, with rules that hold volume with your primary carrier until negotiated discounts are secured. You capture the savings at the margins without breaking the economics at the core.
On cycle time, Sendflex speeds up rating and carrier routing throughout the order to deliveyr cycle. Best carrier services are selected based on predictive delivery performance instead of published transit times. If a ground service can meet the same delivery promise as a premium express service based on historical carrier performance, Sendflex selects ground automatically. It’s the same commitment to the customer but at a lower cost to you.
Legacy shipping systems and carrier APIs weren’t built to calculate and compare rates in real time at the cart, at allocation, and at the dock. Sendflex’s in-platform rating engine processes millions of rates per second, fast enough to put a fully loaded rated decision at every step of the order cycle without slowing any of them down.
Get in touch to learn more about Sendflex and see our platform in action.
