A couple of weeks ago, we launched the world’s greatest freight experiment. We took a list of the top 15 freight forwarders in the world, created a fake company, complete with telephone number, email and fax, and requested a simple door-to-door price quote for shipping some pallets from China to New York. The results? You’d be surprised. Check out the video below:
Fast Freight Quotes as a Differentiator
Freight is a cut-throat business. Almost 50% of the 3PL market is dominated by the top fifteen freight forwarders, while nearly 100,000 small and medium freight forwarders compete with each other for the remaining 50%. But shippers are not happy; the 18th 3PL Study found that only 55% of shippers are happy with the their freight vendors’ IT capabilities.
Despite the incredibly slow quoting process and other IT shortcomings, the 3PL industry is still huge. In 2012, the global 3PL revenue was about $677 billion dollars. And based on this experiment, quoting faster and more accurately is the best way to get a bigger chunk of that pie.
Check out The Great Freight Experiment Part Two, where we requested 7 online, phone and email quotes from one of the world’s biggest freight forwarders.
