Blind Shipments Explained & More Listener Q&A | Final Mile 149

Welcome And How Q&A Works

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back for another edition of the Final Mile. This is our QA session. It's all of questions from you guys. We pulled these from uh YouTube and our Facebook group today. So if you're not in the Facebook group, definitely hop in there. There's a link in the show notes. There's over a hundred thousand, well over a hundred thousand of you that are in there now participating every single day. So, and uh check out all the other content at our website, freight360.net, and check out the sponsors down below to help support the channel

Best Load Board For Dry Vans

SPEAKER_00 0:31

here. All right, Ben. Our first question: what load board is best for dry vans? We actually just did a great episode on how to source capacity. Uh so check that one out if you guys haven't. But um curious your thoughts. I've always been a like, I've always kind of seen like dry van and reefer. I kind of like sway towards DAT. And if it's open deck, like a flatbed or something like that, I I find truck stop to be kind of the uh the better option um out of the three main equipment types there. What what's been your kind of your take on it or your experience? Same.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Yeah, like I I just like dry vans, um, reefers definitely seem more they're just more on DAT. You can definitely cover loads on truck stop, and sometimes you need both on a tough lane, but they're definitely more on DAT. I would say that like flatbeds, open deck, tend there tend to be more of them active on truck stop. I think that's just kind of how the industry formed in that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Yeah, I think a big part of it is like when you when you think about most carriers are small carriers, so you get a lot of like one or two trucks. Um they they're trying to, you know, they're trying not to waste money where they don't need to. So if they, you know, if they're new, they might just say, I'm I'm only gonna have one load board, right? And we just tend to find that truck stop has inherited the majority of the or I guess the the larger percentage of those smaller carriers that really just operate in the flatbed or open deck world, and dat has kind of gotten your um van and reefer. But to your point again, like you can source any equipment type on either of those platforms. Um, it's just which one tends to be you know have better results. So if you can have you know truck stop and DAT, I mean you could have everything, right? Get every single load board out there, it'd be great. Um, but if you you know if you can at least get a the two two big load boards there, that's probably very helpful. Um, but yeah, I'd say DAT is probably where we're gonna have a better have a better shot there. So um 10% off your first year, use the link down in the uh description there if you want to get a discount on your DAT subscription. So all right. Our next question.

Freight Photos And Booking Transparency

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Um, should brokers be sharing pictures and details of the freight before the carrier books the load? I think the situation in this, this was from our Facebook group. Someone said they was smoking what they were upset about is the broker refused to send them pictures of the freight beforehand, and then when they showed up, it ended up being something different than what the broker said. So I'm curious what's your take on sharing? I I think it's not I don't see an issue with sending pictures of what the freight looks like because you're gonna want to know dimensions and how it's gotta be strapped down and all that stuff. But what's your take?

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Super common in open deck to have photos in dimensions when you're moving anything like over dimensional. So like I it was way more common in that world for people to ask and for me to have them from my shipper. Um, I think that's still pretty common. I would say that like there's still like a fraud aspect where like brokers don't put commodities in there because you're literally advertising what could be stolen, which is one reason why it's not done in a lot of cases. The second thing, too, is there's a negotiation advantage to not publicly putting what is in the comments, your loads details on the commodity. And the reason is because, like, from a carrier's point of view, loads are not all the equivalent. Like, floor-loaded tires are definitely not a load drivers are excited to go do when their driver assists compared to like, you know, 12 pallets, right? That they're just gonna load on the truck pretty quick. So, like, when you have harder freight to move, like you'll just get less phone calls, even though you might be willing to pay more, you don't even get to have the conversation. So, like, I mean, that's very old school, but that was one of the reasons why that wasn't done. Um, and that's also why one of the first questions a dispatcher asks when they call you and they're calling all the loads available on the board is like, hey, what are you moving? Where's this picking up? Because they're writing that down and then trying to figure out which is the best, not just lane or rate, but like product to move. Um, there's lots of product that like can damage a trailer, which drivers definitely will avoid and might not call on. Like scrap metal, baled scrap metal was always one that was like mostly avoided unless cares had to be garbage, like literally just garbage. I have a client that moves a lot of recycled garbage, like a lot of it. Like that's his whole book of business. So, like there's local carriers that do that. But again, if you're a carrier that has another lane that week where you have like running kosher food and you need food grade trailer, you can't exactly run a front haul the week the earlier in the week of garbage, or you gotta go get a trailer wash, you gotta do all like so there's a lot of different reasons for this. And also, I would point out that like some of the load boards that are newer that are like requiring you to put your commodities and details in there to get more carriers to take loads to their load board. Um, we had this happen last week where a carrier that ran the lane two weeks ago had no issue, right? It was good lane, no problem. But the loads are auto-posted to this load board with the integration. So the carrier from two weeks ago saw the load again, did not call us. We booked another carrier on it, and the truck from two weeks ago just went and picked up the load. And they're like, hey, we're here again. We were here two weeks ago. We know what the commodity is, we saw the lane, and we know what you're moving. So they literally just went and picked up the load and didn't tell anybody. And then the truck we sent, we had to pay a truck order not used, found out from the shipper that the carrier that was there two weeks ago picked up the load. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

I'll say the when you're dealing with oversize, overweight, stuff like that. I think pictures are more and more common because you want to make sure that the specific equipment type that you're gonna be booking that they know what they can handle and what the drop is.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

Drop decks, double drops, low boys, all that stuff. Like you need to know which what how sometimes the commodity is shaped where you're moving. Like whether it's a piece of machine, like we I have another client that does this, like does a lot of machinery from auctions or manufacturers that they sell. So like there's lots of different equipment on a truck. How long it is and wide matters for the equipment you're gonna put it on. Like, you a lot of times as a broker will request that picture so you can confirm you're sending the right truck. The shipper doesn't always know this. Like they may have a general idea, but they might sometimes they'll just have like I've had customers, they'll just give you like the description and the dimensions. So like I have to Google it to see what it is, and I'm like, oh, like that won't fit on a truck because it's like a little bit wider here, and you can't load it this way. So now you're over with. And like a lot of those things get lost when you don't have an image to take a look at, even for the broker to confirm, let alone you should probably also do that with your carrier.

Blind Shipments Explained

SPEAKER_00 7:34

All right, last question are blind shipments a scam or legit? So the whole short answer is they're usually legit. Um, I could see where confusion comes in, or while someone that's new to it might think like it seems a little fishy. Um a blind shipment is when you know one party doesn't want another party to know who the shipper was, for example. So um, or you might have a double blind where neither party knows who the um the other one is. So what I guess where this might be relevant is if I'm a supplier of a certain product, and let's just say I will just make it up. I supply ping pong balls, right? And I have a customer that wants to buy ping pong balls, and they call me and they're like, Nate, I need ping pong balls. I'm like, cool, I'll send you ping pong balls. So I have them picked up from a third-party ping pong vendor and delivered to my customer. And I don't want my customer to know who that vendor is because they might cut me out the next time and go directly to them for their ping pong balls, right? That's where you'd have a blind shipment where the receiver knows that they're ordering from me, but they don't actually know who the shipper was where those ping pong balls came from. So that's an example of a blind shipment. It keeps a uh it keeps the relationship um protected for that distributor of ping pong balls in that example. So I know that's a wild one that's not a real example, but we see it a lot with situations where the your customer isn't the shipper, right? Um, and they want to protect that so that they don't get backdoored or back solicited or whatnot. So anything to add on that?

SPEAKER_01 9:32

Yeah, like this is done in food a lot with distributors, right? Like there's lots of companies that like will sell. Um we have like two huge customers that this is their entire business model. Everything is ship blind. Um, they don't make their own product, they buy products from different places to ship to the same customer based on the best price. So they don't want their customer to know where that food came from because then their customer just cuts them out and calls out their food brokers, right? Um, so super common. Um, and also sometimes like you might normally ship the product to them from your warehouse. You might not have enough inventory. So, like this shipment you have picked up from somewhere else to keep your customer happy, you don't want them to know that sometimes you have to buy product last minute because then they'll just order from them. So there's this is super common and done very frequently across the industry.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

Very good. Good questions.

Final Thoughts And Send Questions

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Keep sending them our way, and we'll continue to answer. Final thoughts, Ben.

SPEAKER_01 10:27

Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right. And until next time, go bills.