You describe the load and the two addresses. The platform works out what the movement needs, finds carriers for each part of it, gathers quotes and puts them into a form you can compare. A person picks the option that reaches you, and you decide whether to take it.
Worth saying before anything else, because this is the page where it's easiest to assume otherwise.
We don't own vessels, operate services or hold slot allocations. The ocean carrier does, and they contract with you.
We never take custody of cargo and never contract as the carrier. We find and coordinate; the carriers carry.
No trucks, no drayage fleet, no warehouse. Every leg is run by a provider that does this for a living, and they contract with you.
Reddlaw Logistics Inc. is a digital freight intermediary. We match businesses that need freight moved with the carriers that move it, and coordinate the shipment through to delivery. We are not the physical transporter of anything, and we’re not a party to the contract of carriage — the same language is in our terms.
The booking form asks about the load, not about the equipment.
You give the pieces, the weight, the dimensions, what the goods actually are, both addresses and the date the freight is ready. Weight takes kg, lb, t or ton; dimensions take cm, in, m or ft. That is what the carriers quoting your lane work from, and it’s enough for them to price a container movement.
If you already know the equipment you need, put it in the commodity description or the notes. There is no dropdown for container size — the form is built around describing the freight, and the people quoting it read what you wrote. Telling them is better than making them infer it.
You’ll also be asked how the freight comes on and off at each end, what kind of site each address is, and who to contact there. On a container move that’s usually straightforward, and it’s the same set of questions covered in more detail on the pallet freight page.
An ocean move is almost never only an ocean move.
You don’t pick a transport mode. The platform works out the route from the lane and the load, and a sea movement is planned as a set of legs — the inland run at the origin, the ocean leg, the inland run at the destination — rather than as one line item. Carriers are sourced for each leg, which is why a quote can come back covering parts of the journey rather than all of it, and why what you’re shown is assembled rather than forwarded on.
What we won’t do is quote you a transit time or promise a lane. Schedules and performance belong to the carrier doing the work, and a number from us would be a guess with a confident font. Whether carriers are available on a particular lane is a shipment-by-shipment question, answered by asking them.
Captured properly, handled by the right person.
A cross-border booking requires two answers: who is handling customs — your own broker or one Reddlaw assigns — and who pays duties and taxes, shipper or consignee. Incoterms default to DAP, with DDP, EXW, FOB and CIF available. FOB and CIF are the port-handoff terms most container shippers will recognise; pick one against a door-to-door address and the form will point that out.
Customs itself gets contracted out rather than left with you. If you don’t have a broker, Reddlaw assigns one, and the answers above are what that broker works from. Reddlaw isn’t a licensed customs broker itself — what you’re choosing here is operational responsibility, not a customs ruling, and the ruling belongs to someone qualified to make it.
Cargo insurance is the one thing in this area we don’t arrange at this time. If you want coverage, arrange it directly or confirm it with your carrier.
Onboarding market and shipping lane are two different things.
We onboard customers in Australia, New Zealand and across Europe including the UK, Switzerland and Norway. That decides where you’re billed — not where your goods can go. An Australian importer bringing a container in from Asia is a routine booking here, and the origin and destination fields take any country.
The one exception today: we can’t arrange a shipment with a United States origin or destination until our US broker bond is in place.
Related: moving a pallet, how this differs from using a forwarder, freight in Australia, and what it costs.
Further reading, written to be useful whoever you end up shipping with: why two quotes for the same shipment come back so different and how to compare freight quotes without getting caught by missing charges.