Driving shipping costs down will increase your bottom line.
The largest expense your company can have is the expense you incur shipping your product. It can take up to two weeks to ship your product across the country by rail, so often the only choice you have is to ship your product by truck. If you are shipping products to areas which have a lot of industry you will not have to pay a truck as much as you will if you are shipping products to consumer states that do not have a lot of return loads to bring a trucker back home.
Instructions
1. Ship full trailer loads whenever possible. It is cheaper in the end to ship a full trailer load than it is to ship a less-than full trailer load. Often rates on LTL freight can be almost as high as FTL plus you cannot specify a delivery time on the freight because the truck will have deliveries for other customers on the load.
2. Locate local carriers with whom you can develop long-term relationships. Carriers will often work with shippers on rates if they know they have a permanent working relationship. A trucker prefers to run dedicated routes whenever possible. Look at your product destinations and find a carrier that wants to go to those destinations. If you have the ability to offer a carrier frequent loads there he will offer you a discount rate to receive your business.
3. Ask your customers if they have available freight for trucks. If you are able to open some doors for your carriers to find other freight, they will offer you a cheaper rate. Sitting between loads can be expensive for carriers so if they know when they take a load for you that they already have a load out of the destination, they will discount their rates.
4. Signup for an Internet load board (see Resources). You can post your loads free and wait for carriers to call you. If you put the rate that you want to pay for the load on the board, you will eliminate a lot of calls from carriers that want more money than you want to pay.
