How to compare freight quotes without getting caught by missing charges

Don't compare the totals. Compare what each quote assumed — the service level, the equipment at each end, whether waiting time and fuel are included, and what happens if the delivery site turns out to need an appointment. The cheapest number on the page is very often the one that left the most out.

You emailed four carriers. Three replied. One quoted a number that's forty percent below the others, and you're now trying to work out whether you've found a bargain or a problem.

Usually it's a problem, and usually it's not dishonesty. Carriers price what they're told. A quote is an answer to a question, and if two carriers understood your question differently, their numbers were never comparable in the first place.

Step one: check they quoted the same job

Before anything else, confirm every quote covers the same scope. This is where most of the gap usually lives.

• Door to door, or terminal to terminal? A quote that stops at a depot and one that delivers to your customer's loading bay are different products. On international moves, port to port versus door to door can be most of the price.
• The same dates? A quote for next Tuesday and a quote for whenever capacity appears are not the same commitment.
• The same weight and dimensions? Check what each carrier actually keyed in. A transposed dimension or a weight entered in the wrong unit produces a number that looks like a bargain right up until the freight is weighed.
• The same commodity? If one carrier priced it as general freight and another understood it needed special handling, you have two prices for two different jobs.

Step two: the accessorials

Accessorial charges are services beyond the basic movement, and they are where a freight bill quietly becomes larger than the quote. They apply per end — collection and delivery are assessed separately — and most of them are triggered by the physical reality of the site rather than by anything you asked for.

The ones worth confirming explicitly on every quote:

• Liftgate. A truck with a powered platform to lower freight to ground level. Needed wherever there's no dock and no forklift. Frequently assumed away in the cheap quote.
• Dock, forklift, or pallet jack. What equipment exists at each end, and who supplies it. A pallet that has to come off at the kerb with no equipment on site is a different job to one rolled off at a dock.
• Residential delivery. Almost universally a surcharge, and the definition is the carrier's, not yours. A home business with a driveway is usually residential regardless of what your invoice address says.
• Limited access. Construction sites, schools, farms, military bases, anything with restricted entry or a long approach. Another surcharge with a carrier-defined boundary.
• Appointment required. If the site needs a booked delivery window, someone has to arrange it and the truck has to hit it. Both cost.
• Waiting time, or detention. Free time at each end is usually limited to a set number of minutes. After that the clock runs. Ask how long you get and what the rate is afterwards.
• Redelivery. What happens if nobody's there. A second attempt is rarely free and occasionally costs more than the original leg.

If you're not sure which of these apply to your shipment, the site questions on our pallet freight page are a decent checklist — they're the same questions a carrier will eventually ask you, just asked before the price is set rather than after.

Step three: fuel, and what 'all-in' means

Fuel surcharges are usually a percentage of the line haul, and they move. A quote given as a base rate plus a fuel percentage is not directly comparable to one given as a single number, and the percentage may be indexed to something that changes weekly.

“All-in” is the phrase to interrogate hardest. It rarely means all-in. It usually means all the charges the carrier can foresee given what you told them, which excludes anything triggered on the day: waiting time, a failed delivery, an access problem, a reweigh. Ask what specifically is included and what would be billed separately, and get the answer in writing.

Step four: liability, which is not insurance

Carrier liability is usually capped, and usually calculated by weight rather than by what the goods are worth. A pallet of electronics and a pallet of packaging may carry identical liability limits despite wildly different values.

That cap is not cargo insurance. If your goods are worth materially more than the liability limit, the coverage gap is yours. Insurance is a separate product and you arrange it separately — Reddlaw doesn't arrange it at this time either, and we'd rather say that plainly than let it be assumed.

Step five: what happens after you accept

A price is only half of what you're buying. The rest is what the provider does when something goes wrong, and that's harder to see on a spreadsheet.

Ask who tells you if the shipment stalls, and whether you find out because they called or because you did. Ask what happens if the freight is refused at delivery. A slightly higher quote from someone who will notice a problem before you do is often the cheaper shipment.

The practical version

Build a small table. One row per quote. Columns for base rate, fuel, each accessorial you know applies, liability limit, and transit commitment. Fill it in from the quotes themselves, and email the provider for anything you can't fill in. The gaps in that table are the entire risk.

Doing this properly for four quotes takes about half an hour, every time you ship. That's the actual cost of comparing freight quotes yourself, and it's why the work gets skipped and the cheapest number gets picked.

It's also, specifically, what Reddlaw automates: quotes come back in whatever format each carrier chose, get read and normalised so the numbers mean the same thing, and a person picks the option before it's presented to you. If you'd rather see that than read about it, the demo is open with no signup.