Most shippers don't switch carriers all at once. They test. And that's the right instinct.

The problem is that a lot of carrier tests end without a clear answer. The volume was too small to mean anything, nobody agreed on what success looked like, or the results lived in a carrier portal no one checked. Three months later, the team is right back where it started.

A good alternative carrier pilot is small enough to be low risk and structured enough to produce a decision. Here's how to set one up.

Start with the lanes where you have the most to gain

Don't pilot everywhere. Pull your shipping data and find the lanes where your current carriers cost the most or miss transit times most often. Those are your candidates.

Then look for overlap with alternative carrier strength. A carrier with a sort facility near your warehouse and dense delivery coverage in your top destination markets is a much better test than one that technically reaches the area.

One or two origin-destination regions is plenty for a first pilot.

Size the volume so the results mean something

A few dozen parcels won't tell you much. One bad day can swing the numbers. Aim for enough steady daily volume in your pilot lanes that a single late truck doesn't define the result, and plan to run it long enough to see normal week-to-week variation. For most shippers, that means at least four to six weeks.

Keep the volume steady. A pilot that gets 500 parcels one week and 50 the next is hard to read.

Decide what success looks like before you ship a single parcel

This is the step most teams skip. Agree up front on the handful of numbers that will decide the outcome, and write them down.

On-time delivery rate against the carrier's stated service level is the obvious one. Transit time by destination matters just as much, especially if you've made delivery promises to customers. Cost per parcel should include every fee, not only the base rate. And keep an eye on exceptions like damage, lost parcels and how quickly claims get resolved.

Shippers are clear about what they need here. In Tusk's 2026 Alternative Carrier Benchmark Report, 56% said proven reliability data would make them more likely to adopt alternative carriers, and 57% named faster or comparable transit times as their top requirement beyond cost. A pilot is how you get that proof for your own network.

Measure at the hub, not just the carrier

A carrier's network-wide on-time rate is an average. Your parcels move through specific hubs, and performance can vary from one facility to the next. If you only look at the carrier-level number, you can miss a strong hub hiding behind a weak one, or the other way around.

Track results by the hubs your parcels actually touch. That's the data that tells you whether to expand, adjust or move on.

Keep customer experience in the loop

Your customers won't know they're part of a pilot, and they shouldn't. Make sure tracking flows into the same place your customers and support team already use, and watch for changes in "where is my order" tickets in the test lanes. If visibility drops, that counts against the pilot even if on-time numbers look good.

Make the call, then expand in steps

When the pilot ends, go back to the success criteria you wrote down. If the carrier hit them, expand to more volume in the same lanes or add adjacent regions. If it missed, figure out whether the problem was the carrier, a specific hub or the lane itself.

Either way, you'll have an answer based on your own parcels, which is worth more than any sales deck.

Where Tusk fits

Running a pilot carrier by carrier means a new contract, integration, label setup and invoice for each one. Tusk is the shipping infrastructure that connects e-commerce shippers to alternative carriers across all U.S. ZIP codes through a single integration, with unified invoicing and hub-level performance insights. That means you can start a pilot without the setup work, see results by hub as they happen, and expand to more carriers or lanes without starting over.

Planning a carrier pilot? Talk to Tusk.