So I currently work in a 3PL logistics company which does airfreight, so they have everything and I work in the accounts department there. So I was wondering, is it possible that I can act as a broker and work with another broker who already has a shipper, and we share margins. If possible, then where do you find such brokers?
For those in logistics or freight, where do most of your clients actually come from, referrals, brokers, partnerships, ads, or something else? And for those with experience, what are the most underestimated parts of the business that people don’t realize until they’re already running it?
Trying to understand both what drives growth and what actually makes or breaks operations in this industry. Just new in the industry, appreciate the answers.
Permission to post mods
The question leading me in this question is basically “how high can I go with this pallet?”
Obviously, this is not a super simple question/answer, so that’s why I broadly ask for quality reading material or any resources anyone may have on the topic.
This post is the only place where Requests, Promotions, and Feedback about software are allowed to be made. Any posts for the same outside of this thread will be deleted.
Unfortunately we are experiencing a time where we are seeing many start ups and coders trying to branch into the Logistics area that surpass our capacity to filter. Instead of deleting dozens of posts a day, this is an opportunity for them to still post.
Will try to make this a reoccurring post, we will see how its received and works for the community.
Also note since this is a place for software, any non-software related posts can be reported as spam.
Please note things that are well received:
* Valid use cases and proven examples provided
* Industry specific and relevant knowledge
Things not normally received well:
* AI tools that are low hanging fruit
* Outsiders looking for opportunities to "automate", "shake up", "build workflows" or require someone to tell them what needs to be built
Here’s my background:
About 5 years ago, I started a trucking company with absolutely no business experience. I didn’t have enough money to buy a truck at the time, so I started as an independent freight broker first.
That didn’t work out financially, but I gained a lot of knowledge about logistics, freight operations, and business through the experience.
Eventually, I saved enough money to get my own authority and operate as a carrier. Within the first month of renting a truck, I failed again mainly due to inexperience dealing with rental companies, insurance issues, and VIN switching complications.
Even after those setbacks, I refused to quit.
Right now, I’ve started a dispatching company because I wanted to stay active in the transportation industry instead of stopping completely while figuring out my next move.
At the same time, I decided to go back to college and found a Supply Chain diploma program that may eventually transfer into a full degree.
Currently, I also work in the live entertainment industry building stages and sets for tours, festivals, and events.
My questions:
I’ve failed a few times, but each failure taught me something valuable, and I’m trying to turn that into something bigger instead of quitting.
Would appreciate honest feedback.
Hi, could anyone share or advise about earnings for import coordinator / clearance agent in airfreight. What would be a UK salaries average for someone who has 1,5 year and over 4 mexperience in handling imports on road sea and air, previously export 2,5 years and overall qualifications levels 2 and 3 in customs/ freight forwarding a BTEC and BIFA moving purely to airfreight should look like. Would 30k for someone with mid 4+ years experience in freight forwarding be considered low?
I’m the shipper for an LCL shipment under FCA terms, and I understand the seller/shipper should still handle export declaration/export clearance.
The forwarder is consolidating the cargo and has issued a draft BL, but the shipper name on the BL is shown as the forwarder/consolidator instead of my company.
Is this normal for LCL because it is a Master BL, or should I be asking for a House BL showing my company as shipper? Also, how should export declaration be arranged if the BL shipper is the forwarder?
Did something go wrong here, or is this just standard LCL consolidation practice?
I've chase and chase but NOA always gotten 1-2 days before arrival. Short transit or not, it's always "last min". We need time to make payment and other prep.
I spent a while going through the usual options before landing on something that actually worked and the pattern I kept running into was the same across most of them.
The problem with Alibaba isn't that the factories aren't there, it's that you can't tell which listings are real manufacturers and which are trading companies presenting themselves as one. Gold supplier status just means they paid for the tier. it tells you nothing about whether they actually make anything. so you send out RFQs, you get responses back, and you're basically doing forensic work on every single reply trying to figure out who you're actually talking to before you've even asked a real question about your product.
Most of the managed sourcing options I looked at had the same issue in a different form. go ship pro, ecomm flow, day one fulfillment, they all handle logistics well but sourcing is either secondary or the vetting depth isn't something you can actually verify. You're still trusting someone else's process without being able to see how that process works.
The two that actually felt different were kanary solutions and commercive. Kanary stood out specifically because the vetting happens before you ever see a supplier name, they're filtering out trading companies on the ground before the list gets to you, so you're not starting from the full unfiltered pool. Commercive handles discovery on your behalf too which takes the manual work off your plate, though in my experience the depth varied depending on the product category.
If you've gone through this process, what actually replaced alibaba as a starting point for you?
Alright, let me be straight with you.
I'm a freight broker. I spend my days on the phone and in front of a screen trying to match freight with the right people to move it. And right now, I've got a customer with a solid lane that needs reliable carriers — not a one-and-done, but actual consistent volume over the next few weeks.
Here's the load:
Picking up out of Bedford Park, IL 60638, delivering to Beloit, WI 53511. About 90 miles, straightforward run. The freight is palletized bundles of treated wood boards, up to 44,000 lbs. Standard dry van, nothing exotic.
The schedule looks like this, 2 loads this week, 9 loads next week, and 5 more the first week of June. That's 16 loads total. My customer needs this moved and they need it done right.
I don't have a target rate to throw at you. I'm not going to lowball you with a number and see who bites. That's not how I like to do business. So instead, I'm coming here and asking you directly — what's your best rate on this lane?
If you're a carrier running Illinois or Wisconsin and you've got the capacity, I genuinely want to hear from you. Drop your rate in the comments or shoot me a DM. Let's talk.
We are currently looking for a reliable 3PL partner for a long-term collaboration.
Our warehouse is located in Oakville, Ontario, and we ship approximately 50 pallets of machinery parts per month to various locations across Canada. Most shipments require LTL freight services.
We are looking for a logistics partner that can provide dependable service, competitive rates, and strong nationwide coverage to support our growing operation.
If your company specializes in LTL freight and 3PL solutions across Canada, feel free to reach out.
I previously worked in spice exports from India, and one thing I noticed was how much of the supplier discovery and verification process is still manual and trust-based.
Curious to hear from importers, sourcing teams, and logistics professionals here:
Trying to understand real-world sourcing and logistics pain points from the buyer side.
Hey everyone,
If it's your first time reading one of my posts, I break down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.
Let's jump into it,
Freight brokers used to have a legal shield that made it almost impossible to sue them when a carrier they hired caused an accident. The Supreme Court just took that shield away. Unanimously.
The case goes like this. A guy named Shawn Montgomery lost his leg when a truck hauling plastic pots veered off the road in Illinois. C.H. Robinson was the freight broker that booked the carrier. Montgomery tried to sue Robinson for hiring a dangerous carrier. C.H. Robinson's defense was essentially: federal law protects us from these kinds of lawsuits. A lower court agreed. The Supreme Court said no, actually, it doesn't.
That defense, which brokers across the industry have leaned on for years, is now gone.
So what changes? Brokers can now be sued in any state if they hired a carrier that had obvious red flags and something went wrong. The legal standard isn't that brokers have to guarantee nothing bad ever happens. It's just that they have to do their homework before booking a carrier. Check their safety record. Look them up. If a carrier had a terrible track record and you booked them anyway and someone got hurt, you're going to have a hard time explaining that to a jury.
The scary part is how much information is freely available. FMCSA's safety database is public and free. Crash rates, inspection history, out-of-service records, all of it is right there. Plaintiff attorneys have known this for years and have been building cases in anticipation of exactly this ruling. Those cases are getting filed soon.
And it's not just brokers. The court wrote about brokers because that's who the case was about, but the same logic applies to 3PLs, freight forwarders, and anyone else who selects carriers as part of their business.
What this means for you: If you broker freight or select carriers on behalf of clients, you need a documented process for vetting them. Not a mental checklist. An actual written process with records you can pull up later. If your current approach is basically "they have a valid license and a truck," that's not going to cut it anymore. Call your insurance broker, too, and ask whether your current coverage would actually respond to this kind of claim, because many policies weren't written with this exposure in mind.
Four weeks ago, we covered the Canadian 3PL expansion story in Edition 41: GXO opening in Mississauga, Arvato acquiring Think Logistics, IMC, and DP World planting flags north of the border. The thesis was that Canada's 3PL market, projected to nearly double to $49.7 billion by 2033, was finally ready for its moment.
This week, the biggest Canadian last-mile story yet: UniUni, the Richmond, BC-based delivery company, is reportedly planning to go public via a SPAC merger.
According to The Globe and Mail, the deal would merge UniUni with MAK Acquisition, a TSX-listed SPAC led by former Dye & Durham CEO Matthew Proud, valuing the combined entity at over $1 billion USD. UniUni is also raising $100 million in a PIPE alongside the deal. MAK confirmed it's in discussions but hasn't signed anything.
The numbers in the confidential memo obtained by The Globe and Mail are striking. Revenue grew from $113 million in 2023 to $295 million in 2024, then to $683 million in 2025. The company expects $1.1 billion this year and $1.5 billion in 2027. They lost $70 million in 2025 but expect profitability this year and $125 million in pre-tax profit in 2027.
UniUni runs a gig-powered delivery model, with 100,000 registered drivers delivering 1.2 million packages per day. Its primary customers are Shein and Temu. The company raised $85 million just two months ago from Beijing-based Rockets Capital and RBC, bringing total funding to $285 million.
There are some things worth watching carefully here. Uni's labor practices have drawn scrutiny, including multiple proposed class-action lawsuits. Media reports last year surfaced sordid conditions at a Connecticut warehouse. A company going public with that kind of background will face a different level of examination than a private operator.
But the growth trajectory is hard to argue with. And the timing, landing right as the Canada 3PL market is heating up and as Shein and Temu continue scaling North American operations, isn't an accident.
We've been tracking the Gulf crisis since the Strait of Hormuz closed, and one of the stories nobody expected to write is this: the global economy is partly being held together by 3,500 trucks running around the clock across the Arabian desert.
The Hormuz closure forced a rapid rerouting of trade. Shipping lanes built around a single chokepoint suddenly became unusable. What happened next was improvised on a scale that's genuinely hard to process.
Saudi Arabia's state-controlled mining company, Maaden, which exports phosphate fertilizer to global markets, had its entire supply chain misdirected. Its CEO, Bob Wilt, dispatched executives to Red Sea ports within days of the conflict starting. Two weeks later, he had rail and truck operators lined up. Six hundred trucks became 1,600, became 2,000, became 3,500. Each truck runs with two drivers to keep moving around the clock.
Wilt said Maaden will have caught up on its export backlog by the end of May. The cargo is already reaching Djibouti, Thailand, and Argentina via the Red Sea port of Yanbu.
And Maaden isn't the only one. MSC and Maersk are trucking goods across the Arabian Peninsula. Etihad Rail Freight moved hundreds of Nissans by train from Fujairah to Abu Dhabi, the country's first vehicle transport by rail. The UAE's port of Khor Fakkan saw truck traffic explode from 100 a day to 7,000. Weekly container traffic at the port went from 2,000 to 50,000. The operator, Gulftainer, hired 900 people in two weeks.
A UAE supermarket chain dispatched trucks loaded with British snacks on a 16-day journey from Kent through Western Europe, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to Dubai. This is the kind of supply chain improvisation that doesn't fit in a playbook.
Trucking routes can't match the capacity of ocean shipping or compete on cost. And they don't fix the energy crunch. But they've become a meaningful shock absorber in key markets, sustaining trade flows that would otherwise have collapsed.
It's also worth reading alongside the Mexico corridor story from a few weeks ago. Whether it's Mexico's Interoceanic Corridor, the Arabian desert routes, or LNG tankers taking the long way around, the same pattern keeps showing up: when a single-point bottleneck breaks, geography and improvisation fill the gap faster than anyone predicted. The traders who are ahead of it are the ones who already had contingency options mapped.
Back in Edition 42, we told you the CAPE portal was going live on April 20 and that the government was sitting on up to $175 billion in tariff refunds from duties the Supreme Court struck down in February. We told you to get your clients moving.
Here's the update: the refunds are coming. Faster than expected.
Customs began accepting refund claims on April 20 and said payments would start hitting accounts around May 11. That timeline held. As of last Friday, at least one importer had money in their account. Others received approval notices indicating payments would follow within days.
CMCBrands, a St. Louis apparel company, received notice that its first claim for roughly $42,000 had been approved. Their CEO said she was shocked by how fast it happened. A small wine importer, one of the lead plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, expects to receive $100,000 and plans to use most of it to pay off suppliers. An art supply company in Washington plans to use part of its $18,000 refund to pay down a credit line and fund new product development. A California-based flowerpot importer expecting $150,000 is planning a sourcing trip to Vietnam.
The catch: about 63% of shipments subject to the tariffs are eligible in this first phase. The rest could take until 2027 to process. And the refund process is not automatic. You have to opt in, file the right paperwork, and wait. Some importers are still running into errors on the portal.
If your clients haven't filed yet, get them moving. Make sure their customs paperwork is clean before they submit, because errors will slow everything down. And if you want an intro to someone who can file the paperwork and offer upfront cash while they wait, reply to this email.
LAST MILE ‘Amazon Now’, a 30-minute delivery service for groceries and household essentials, is now live in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, and Seattle, with rapid expansion planned through the rest of the year. Prime members pay $3.99 per delivery. This isn't a shot at FedEx or UPS. It's Amazon planting a flag directly in Uber, DoorDash, and Instacart territory, going after the "I need it now" consumer who's been the whole bet for gig-economy delivery platforms.
M&A Fulfillment Crowd, the UK-based tech-led 3PL backed by Palatine private equity, acquired Fulfilment.nl, a Dutch e-commerce logistics specialist. Fulfilment.nl will operate independently within the group under its existing management team. The Netherlands is a critical European logistics hub, and for fulfilmentcrowd, this is a direct play at cross-border EU volume. The mid-market 3PL consolidation story isn't only happening in North America.
PARTNERSHIPS Instacart added Ace Hardware to its same-day delivery platform, with delivery in as fast as one hour from thousands of locations nationwide. We covered Instacart's acquisition of Instaleap in Edition 42, which was about accelerating international retail partnerships. This is the domestic version of the same strategy: turning Instacart from a grocery app into a local retail delivery layer. The platform now works with more than 2,200 retail banners across nearly 100,000 stores in North America. The pace of category expansion is not slowing down.
ENFORCEMENT A California aluminum company, Perfectus Aluminum Inc., agreed to pay $549.5 million to resolve allegations it evaded antidumping and countervailing duties on Chinese aluminum extrusions. The company imported millions of aluminum extrusions, spot-welded them into "pallets" to misrepresent them as finished merchandise not subject to duties, then imported over 2.2 million of them between 2011 and 2014. A jury convicted the company in 2021. The settlement resolves the civil case. $549.5 million is not a slap on the wrist. With the Trade Fraud Task Force operating at full speed, duty evasion is a much riskier calculation than it was five years ago.
INFRASTRUCTURE CH Robinson's Robinson Fresh division opened a 142,600 square-foot facility in Pharr, Texas, just miles from the US-Mexico border near the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge. The facility has 69 dock doors, multiple temperature zones, and is designed specifically for fresh produce cross-border supply chains. 55% of all fresh produce imported from Mexico enters through Texas. As we've covered, Mexico's role in US supply chains is only getting more entrenched, not less, regardless of what happens in the courts on tariffs. Fresh produce was always going to need infrastructure that matches the volume.
INFRASTRUCTURE Dollar Tree opened a 1 million-square-foot distribution center in Litchfield Park, Arizona, which will serve about 700 stores across the West and Southwest starting next month. A second DC in Marietta, Oklahoma, is scheduled to open in 2027, replacing the facility destroyed by a tornado in 2024. The Arizona opening is part of a deliberate push to reduce transit miles and get product closer to stores. When a retailer whose entire brand promise is price talks about investing in speed, it's usually because transportation costs are eating into margins.
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Looking for a carrier long term, pick up from port of Houston to Mexico City. Thanks!!
Been looking at joining one of the bigger forwarder networks but not sure which actually delivers ROI. Fees aren't cheap (a few k USD/year for most of them) so wondering what the experience has been. Which one to choose?
For those of you who've been members of any of these for 2+ years:
Thanks!
engineering student researching cold chain logistics for a school project. questions for anyone managing reefer freight operations:
what does a rejected load typically cost when a receiver flags a temperature excursion? who eats that cost: carrier, shipper, broker?
how do insurance claims work for spoiled perishable freight? Is it easy to file or a nightmare?
roughly what percentage of reefer loads have some kind of temperature issue during transit?
thnks
Hello everyone,
i've done some material/procurement planning in an 8 months long internship last year but now im unemployed and i was wondering if theres something i can do to increase my chances of getting an interview. although i know the chances are small.
I live in morocco and i think people don't give quiet people many chances although ive done my best to change and i think i improved but still have a long way to go.
Thank u guys for any suggestion
Tried using multiple sources and still unable to be the first choice of a forwarder to become the partner agent.
What else can I do?