The world of shipping and transportation many people working together to ensure the product travels safely to its destination. In today’s shipping, environment, few companies handle their own shipping. Instead, they hire a broker to perform this function. Depending upon their shipping needs, they may be looking at a FTL or an LTL freight broker.
What Is a Freight Broker?
The word used to describe a freight broker is “intermediary.” A freight broker brings together company that’s in need of transporting its goods, and the licensed professional freight transporter. A freight broker leverages all that he or she knows about the business of shipping to provide the shipper with a resource for moving the goods and a carrier with the way to make a living. In other words, while freight brokers work for shippers, they also benefit carriers.
What Are Less than a Truckload (LTL) Carriers and Brokers?
Freight brokers may arrange for the transportation of full truck loads (FTL). These are loads that fill the entire trailer space. They usually weigh over 100,000 pounds. They also tend to go directly from shipping point to final destination without being transferred to another truck.
Freight brokers may also hire carriers to handle less than a truck load (LTL) goods. An LTL freight broker understands the needs of shipping companies to ship these loads of less than 100,000 pounds. He understands this and, though LTLs lack full truck occupancy and provide various logistics issues, the broker arranges for such shipments to make it to their destination.
Less than full truck loads do not travel directly from the point of system entry to their destination. Instead, they regularly need to switch trucks at least once if not several times, moving from one terminal to another to achieve a full-load status by combining their products with others bound for similar nearby destinations. This requires a certain skill set and more than a slight knowledge of shipping logistics.
LTL Freight Broker
The market share for LTL shipping is far less than it is for FTL. However, it remains important. Small businesses simply do not have the products to command a full truckload. By working with an LTL freight broker, these small companies receive the same quality of shipping at comparable rates of the larger FTL shipping companies.
