How to Find Freight Forwarders for Your Business

Every business wants the best freight forwarders for its supply chains. However, it isn’t that easy. To find freight forwarders that are right for you, you need to understand your supply chains and the shipping routes that your supply chains take.

Freight forwarders occupy an important place in global supply chains. They take care of the entire documentation process helping buyers/suppliers manage their logistics needs. Within large supply chains, freight forwarders help localize logistics and take care of negotiating with shipping lines on behalf of businesses.

Without international freight forwarders, businesses would have to take care of all their logistics needs. This would drastically increase costs and would require a lot of dedicated business resources. One thing to note is that when creating a global supply chain, your business might need to deal with multiple freight forwarding companies.

Finding the right freight forwarders for your supply chains can be a complex task. However, this article will help you get started and help you find freight forwarders for your business.

How to Identify the Right Freight Forwarder

There are plenty of freight forwarding companies for each region in the world. For example, South East-Asia alone has over 10,000+ international freight forwarders. For a business to identify the right freight forwarding company, they need to focus on a few factors:

Market Reputation

In the global trade industry, reputation is king. The easiest way to find a freight forwarder is to go for the business that other businesses are already using. With a reputed freight forwarder, you can have peace of mind for the goods that you want to ship. However, reputed players often charge high rates for their services, and sometimes they may not have the bandwidth to take care of your business’ shipping needs.

Services offered

Simply providing traditional freight forwarding service isn’t enough. Sometimes your business can have specific needs for your cargo. For instance, if you are trying to ship hazardous goods such as strong chemicals, you need a forwarder that has prior experience with the same.In such cases, you may have certain criteria for your freight forwarders. Try finding freight forwarders that are experts for your particular goods or requirements.

Network

The freight forwarder that you are choosing to trust with your goods must have a good network. The average freight forwarder needs to have contacts across various regions. Look for a forwarder that has an extensive network of agents, affiliations, partners, and more.

Pricing

Global supply chains are expensive and require a lot of investment at every level. When looking for freight forwarders, you will have a budget that you will try to stick to.Finding freight forwarding companies that fit your budget is important. Look at the various price brackets freight forwarders give you before agreeing on a freight forwarder.

How to Find Freight Forwarders

The good news is that shipping data from around the world is recorded in every country’s Bill of Lading records. You can find and study this data to find various freight forwarders/ NVOCCs that operate within the industries and locations you need. However, these records are kept in different databases for different countries and are overwhelmingly difficult to go through.

What you need is a supply chain intelligence tool like Trademo Intel. Trademo Intel collects trade data from global bills of lading, compiles them in a consumable format, and provides actionable insights. With Intel, you can view global shipping data records and find the NVOCCs or freight forwarders you need.

Try Trademo Intel

How to Find a Freight Forwarder with Trademo Intel

Trademo Intel provides important shipping data for global shipments. For each shipment that is recorded within Trademo, a user can find the name of the NVOCC/Freight Forwarder that is responsible for shipping the particular shipment.

For example, here’s the name of a freight forwarder responsible for Master Bill - WHLC035BX97687

Here’s how you can use Trademo Intel to find a freight forwarding company that meets their requirements. On the search Shipments page, select a date range. The date range helps you find freight forwarders who have been active in that particular time frame.

We recommend keeping the date range around a year. Leave the search bar empty for now.

The next thing you need to do is use the filters section to select the country of origin for the shipment, port of destination, and foreign port of lading.

Apply these changes to your search. You will see that your shipments will be sorted based on the filters you set.

Once this is done, there are two ways you can view your freight forwarders. You can manually click on every shipment to see the forwarder responsible or you can scroll down on the ‘Filter by’ section and select NVOCCs. This filter section will be updated with the names of all forwarders who are shipping according to your requirements.

You can refine your search further by using other filters such as the port of unlading, consignee city, etc.

Summing Up

Being able to find freight forwarding companies is one of Trademo Intel’s goals. Trademo’s data and analytics have much more important capabilities. Businesses around the world leverage Intel to optimize their supply chains, find new buyers and suppliers, monitor their competition, get real-time updates for important shipments, and more. You can learn more about Trademo’s capabilities and how it helps you improve your business by requesting a demo with us.