Ingram increases freight charges and improves delivery service

The local distributor has also made delivery improvements to the Sydney metropolitan area.

Guy Freeland, vice president and managing director of Ingram Australia told CRN that the distributor is sensitive to cost increases for resellers and Ingram has been managing the increased cost, mainly from rising fuel prices, internally. The last raise in freight was May 2007.

“The average rate charge we might be talking is $12 to $15 and we are saying we need to increase the cost by nine percent on that, so it’s a relatively modest amount of money,” said Freeland.

“We’ve limited the charges to the bare amount that we feel is something we need to do.

“We continue to work hard to make other operational improvements to make sure that in the overall scheme of things we remain at least competitive with the other sources of product in the marketplace. We can demonstrate our strong value-add in a variety of other areas.”

Ingram runs a Drop Ship Program that allows resellers to have their orders delivered directly to the end user with the reseller’s delivery docket with a company logo included. This service will incur an additional $5 charge that will be automatically calculated in the freight matrix.

“The amount of value we provide through the Drop Ship program far exceeds the modest margin we are asking to recover from resellers today. We charge the same price for Drop Ship deliveries that we do for any other deliveries but the parcels and individually packed, labelled and delivered,” said Freeland.

Ingram has received feedback this year from resellers asking for improvement in their delivery services, particularly in the Sydney metropolitan area.

After reviewing their systems internally, changes were made and Freeland reports that feedback has been positive.

“What we did with Star Track Express to improve deliveries, particularly around the high density metropolitan areas of Sydney where resellers require more accuracy with delivery times, is we organised Star Track to run those deliveries on dedicated trucks out of another facility to get them out much earlier,” said Freeland.