Bring your own carrier

Nothing about your carrier deal changes when you connect it to Next Horizon. The rate you negotiated is the rate the label is priced at, the contract stays between you and the carrier, and the person you ring when a pallet goes quiet is still the same person. We generate the label against your account and leave everything else alone. The tracking, the returns, the invoice audit and the Digital Product Passport then work on your rate as they do on ours.

Your contract

We do not change your price, round it or add anything to it. You remain the principal on the transport contract, so the liability you accepted and the claims procedure you already know are the ones that apply. If a parcel goes missing, the claim runs under the procedure you signed with the carrier, the same as last month.

Next Horizon holds no carrier, forwarding or brokerage licence. We hold the contracts we negotiated and the identity of every item that ships; the vans and the warehouses belong to the partners. When a parcel stops at customs, the broker on that lane still does the brokering. The difference is that the hold shows up in your account as a status against named items, rather than a tracking page that has gone quiet.

Services on top of your rate

Whatever rate the label carries, you get the same thing from us on that lane. The label is chosen under a rule you set and your team supervises, and you can see which rate won and why.

Tracking is one page on your domain. Each carrier reports in its own vocabulary, so we map all of them onto one set of statuses, which means your customer sees the same page even when the parcel changes hands halfway through the journey.

Returns start from the identity the outbound label minted. When a customer sends a jacket back, the return label already knows which jacket, so the warehouse knows the incoming item and finance knows the credit due before the box is opened. Return labels count against the same allowance as outbound ones.

The invoice audit reads every line your carrier bills against the parcels that shipped. It catches a parcel re-rated at the depot because the box was bigger than the label said, a surcharge that is not in your contract, or a consignment billed twice. Each one is flagged and the dispute is prepared for you to approve. Your carriers' invoices get the same reading as ours, and the passport is the same passport whichever account printed the label.

Whichever rate the label carries, everything after the label works the same.

Fees and carrier charges

On your own contracts a label counts against your plan allowance and nothing else. The carrier bills you what you agreed with them, as before, and none of that passes through us.

On our rates, shipping is rebilled at the exact carrier price with zero markup, as a pass-through line on your invoice, lane by lane. The subscription is where we earn, so we have no margin riding on which rate wins the label. Every charge, software or transport, is a line you can read.

Past the allowance nothing breaks. Extra labels and passports are billed per unit at your plan's unit rate, and if overage becomes a normal month, the next plan up is usually cheaper. The Free plan covers 20 shipping labels and 20 product passports a month, for as long as you like, on your own carrier contracts, with no card to start. The caps are hard, so there is no overage to think about. It is a reasonable way to watch your carrier account running on your own orders before you pay anything. The plans are on /pricing.

Our rate coverage

Our negotiated last-mile rates are live in France and the United Kingdom, and on the lanes between the two. Everywhere else, the rest of the EU and the rest of the world, it is your contracts, with everything above still working on your rate.

We cannot give you a price without your lanes. Send us your lanes with the volumes and the weight profile on each, and you get the price per lane at carrier cost, which you can set against your own contract on the same lane before a single parcel moves.

Choosing lane by lane

Because your contracts and our rates are treated identically, the choice is a commercial one and never has to be all or nothing.

1. List your lanes. Outside France and the UK your own contracts apply, so the decision is about the lanes inside them.
2. Get our quote on those lanes and set it against your contract rate at the same weight profile.
3. Switch our rate on only where it wins. Both can be live on the same account, the rule you set decides which rate a label takes, and you can see which one won.
4. Come back when your volumes change. A lane that moved to our rate can move back when your own contract improves, because the rule is yours.