What Is Shipping Insurance?

What’s the story: Discover how shipping insurance can help protect your business, enhance customer service and give you peace of mind.

Why it matters: With the continued growth of the ecommerce space, there are increased risks to packages in transit that can affect your bottom-line.

Shipping insurance is purchased by your business and provides coverage for packages that are lost, damaged or stolen by porch pirates. It can cover loss or damage up to the insured value of the goods, plus shipping costs. Your policy can be tailored to your business’s needs based on the goods you ship, how you ship and the carriers you use, as well as include coverage for high-value, fragile, time-sensitive or perishable goods. 

5 Benefits of Shipping Insurance

1. Comprehensive Coverage
With shipping insurance, you can indicate the total value and have confidence that your shipments are protected. 

2. Full Reimbursement and Expedited Reshipment
Customers expect if there is an issue that companies will fix it and fix it quickly. Shipping insurance allows you to quickly reship replacement goods or refund or provide a credit to your customer with more confidence that the associated costs can be offset with less risk to your bottom-line.

3. Quick and Easy Claims
A lengthy claims experience can be a major pain point for businesses when it comes to the shipping experience. With InsureShield^® shipping insurance you can easily file a claim online and, if approved, have the claim paid in days not weeks.

4. Peace of Mind
Not only can your business experience an easy claims process, but you can also ship confidently knowing your items are covered up to the full retail value. You can get the best of both worlds: peace of mind for your business and peace of mind for your customers.

5. Bottomline and Reputation Protection
A lack of resolution support for stolen or damaged packages may cause a buyer to never shop at a retailer again. Businesses can recapture potential lost sales by improving the shipping experience for customers.

What is the alternative to shipping insurance?

Many businesses rely on declared value/carrier liability to protect their goods. Unfortunately, what many businesses may not understand is that declared value/carrier liability is not real insurance.

Carrier liability is the standard liability offered by the carrier for a shipment, in the event of loss or damage (e.g. up to $100 for small package, or $25/lb. for LTL). Excess liability is excess-value coverage (e.g., more than the carrier’s standard liability), up to the cost of the shipment.

When it comes to carrier liability, the burden falls on the shipper to prove that the loss or damage occurred while the goods were in the physical control of the carrier. And, in most cases when there is an approved claim, a carrier will only reimburse replacement value, not your invoice value.

The Bottom Line

Carrier liability is based on small-print terms and a web of governing statutes, some of which date back to the 1930’s. The statutes allow carriers to limit their exposure and exempt a variety of situations from their liability. Shipping insurance is customized to your business and provides financial protection in the event of loss, damage and porch pirated theft.

Let the team at UPS Capital Insurance Agency, Inc. and its affiliates help you get started with a quote and we can go from there.