buytruckload.com expands offerings to shippers

Chicago-based buytruckload.com, a Web-based truckload brokerage in Chicago, said today it has officially expanded its offerings to shippers.

As previously reported by LM, buytruckload.com has two main service offerings for shippers of all sizes—a carrier search and a transportation procurement survey.

The carrier search is comprised of a database of every carrier and broker in the country, with carriers identified by equipment type, size, location, safety performance, and authority, among others. Carrier lists, said the company, can be downloaded to Excel and used to create carrier lists for RFPs.

And the transportation procurement survey provides what buytruckload.com said is a framework for reviewing existing transportation solutions from a strategic design standpoint. This offering requires about a ten-minute self-assessment by a shipper, or transportation buyer, of their current situation and allows participants to compare their results to industry peers and offer immediate feedback.

One notable differentiator between butruckload.com and the thousands of other truckload brokerage players in a highly saturated market is that it does not have a sales force in the traditional sense, coupled with the fact that it is able to provide shippers with instant rate quotes that can be ordered without delay or extended negotiations, company officials said.

What’s more, they said that this automated approach pricing model allows buytruckload.com to improve rates offered to shippers for van, flatbed, and refrigerated loads with partial truckload options along with partial truckload options for van and refrigerated shipments.

buytruckload.com is a sibling company of Partage LLC, a wholesale truckload brokerage that provides transportation resellers, 3PLs, brokers and forwarders with low-cost transactional truckload capacity through a web site that provides automated pricing and on-line booking.

“Starting today we will offer our automated quoting and booking for truckload and partial truckload,” said John Labrie, buytruckload.com co-owner. “We have experience doing this through Partage and have offered this to our 3PL and broker customers over the last year. This is now going to be made available directly to the shipping public and will be the first time the shipping public has ever been able to quote and book truckloads live through the Web.”

Labrie added that this system will work for shippers moving any type of truckload, regardless of size on a regular or infrequent basis, adding it is simple to use and most accessible source of truckload quotes and capacity available in the industry.

On the pricing side, Labrie said buytruckload.com expects to be one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest source of transactional truckload capacity in the market.

“Our rates will be consistently very good, and on average should save shippers $80-$100 per load,” he said. “Because we access customers via the Web, we don’t have the fixed or variable expenses associated with a typical sales staff, which is where the savings comes from for customers. It is taking a whole layer of costs out of traditional truckload brokerage.”

With the truckload brokerage market highly crowded, coupled with the vast amount of truckload carriers, there is often the question of how can a broker add value in connecting a shipper to the right truck ass efficiently as possible, explained Sean Devine, buytruckload.com co-owner.

This has resulted in certain areas of truckload brokerage seeing increased competition as more and more people have gotten into the brokerage business—some with deep financial pockets and others without significant capital—but all with relatively low barriers of entry into the market, he said.

“That makes us focus on how we can connect the shipper to the right carrier for as little as possible,” Devine said. “And we try to reduce that mark up as low as it can possibly go to save $80-$100 per load. A lot of brokerages are focused on getting their slice of the profits that they see others getting and what we are focused on is fundamentally improving the way brokerage works.”