Multi carrier rate shopping is available directly from within a Business Central sales order, allowing a freight quote to be generated before a shipment is even created. This capability, often referred to as a freight quote, has been part of the available shipping functionality for an extended period and works by connecting to multiple carriers to compare shipping options.
How Freight Quoting Works From the Sales Order
From within a sales order, an auto pack option can determine how many packages a shipment will likely require automatically, or a specific package count and configuration can be entered manually. Once packaging is determined, requesting quotes goes out to the carriers configured for the account and returns freight options across those carriers, which then gets added onto the sales order. This gives a customer service representative or salesperson the ability to see and communicate expected shipping cost to a customer before the order is even picked or shipped, rather than waiting until the shipment is created to find out what carrier options and pricing look like.
The Difference Between Getting a Rate and Getting a Label
Getting a rate or freight quote is a separate action from generating a shipping label. A rate check simply returns pricing and carrier options for planning and quoting purposes, without committing to a shipment or creating any tracking information. Generating a label, by contrast, finalizes the carrier selection, creates the shipping label and tracking number, and applies the shipping cost to the order. Both actions rely on the same underlying carrier connections, but serve different points in the fulfillment process, one for advance quoting and one for actual shipment execution.
What This Requires
Multi carrier rate shopping and freight quoting from the sales order requires Dynamic Ship, which provides the more comprehensive shipping and carrier integration capability needed to support multiple carriers, packaging configurations, and international shipping requirements. A simpler shipping tool that only connects to a single carrier account would not provide this same side by side comparison across carriers.
Why This Matters for Sales Teams
Being able to quote freight cost before a shipment exists is particularly useful for sales teams handling orders where shipping cost is a meaningful part of the customer conversation, such as heavier or bulkier items where freight can be a significant portion of total order cost. Rather than guessing or checking with the warehouse, a salesperson can pull a freight quote directly from the sales order screen.
Related Tools
Dynamic Ship provides multi carrier rate shopping, freight quoting, and label generation, including auto pack calculations for determining packaging needs automatically. OrderShip Express offers simpler shipping label and rate generation for companies that need core shipping functionality without full multi carrier freight quoting. This is a completely free app from Insight Works for Business Central.
In summary, freight quoting and multi carrier rate shopping are available directly from the sales order through Dynamic Ship, and have been a supported part of that shipping capability for a considerable time.