The start of something great: freight is moving online
Following suit from other industries, forward thinkers in the industry are already adopting online freight quotes and sales as a key differentiator, gaining an important competitive advantage in a crowded market space.
Early figures point at significant benefits for early adopters.
Preliminary research shows that even mid-size logistics providers can eliminate over $150,000 of operating costs with automated quoting, while other forwarders have reported spot quote win ratios that improve by an
estimated 20% with faster, on-demand quotes.
Online freight sales platforms can provide unprecedented efficiency and optimization in the logistics sales process. The roll-out process can be just as efficient. Since many platforms are cloud-based, and browser and an internet connection is all that is necessary to deploy these platforms to hundreds or thousands of users.
Generally packaged as SaaS (software as a service), these platforms can also be significantly cheaper than deployed legacy software, that also accrues expensive installation and maintenance fees.
Early adopters have already tapped automated freight rate management and quoting, and online quoting, as the future of logistics sales. Much like in other industries, pioneers gain the first-to-market advantage, increasing market share, by enhancing both external and internal transparency and efficiency with e-commerce and, most importantly, providing an outstanding customer experience.
These leaders stand to reap huge benefits, usually at the expense of companies that lack the vision, who ultimately hemorrhage market share to more innovative competitors.