Introduction

Order consolidation is the process of combining multiple orders into a single shipment for delivery to the customer.

Getting Started

1. Contact the support team and they'll get you setup and running with order consolidation

2. Consolidation is supported for all carriers on the FreightExchange platform.

3. Only shipments that have not been dispatched can be consolidated.

4. We do not support consolidation for DG shipments.

5. Consolidation can be used for all of your shipments, or for a specific carrier/carriers

6. Consolidation can be used with your plugins or APIs

7. The labels for each order will be generated as the requests are received

How it works

When consolidating shipments it is important that they end up at the correct destination and there are no delays. As such we apply a strict set of rules when determining when two shipments can be consolidated into one. These rules are as follows:

1. The origin and destination addresses on the two shipments must have an exact match on all of the following fields:

1. Company name

2. Address Line 1

3. Address Line 2

4. City/suburb

5. Post code

6. Country

2. All of the shipments to be consolidated can travel on the specified carrier and service. For example: if on shipment is too large/small etc to travel on an existing service, it will not be consolidated.

In the FreightExchange system, a single manifest is generated for all consignments & orders that are being shipped through the same for a given period. 

Closing the manifest is the last step of the shipping process as the closed manifest is used as proof of the consignments that are being dispatched to the carrier.

Please note that the address matching applies exact matching only.

Printing Labels

When a shipment is consolidated you will receive sets of labels for each individual Order/Request/Quote sent via the Quote API. Consider this example:

• Order/Request/Quote 1 is for 2 items - 2 labels are returned, for items 1 and 2 in a single pdf.
• Order/Request/Quote 2 is for 3 items - 3 labels are returned, for items 3, 4 and 5 in a single pdf.
• Order/Request/Quote 3 is for 1 item - 1 label is returned, for item 6 in a single pdf.

An important consideration here is that the labels will not display the total number of items since this cannot be known when the labels are generated.