Moving freight without a logistics team

The problem isn't that you're small

It's that freight is enough work to cost someone real time, and it isn't anyone's actual job. There's no department to hand it to, and hiring one is out of proportion to the number of shipments you actually move.

What the work looks like now

Most of it isn't hard. It's just slow, and it lands on someone who has other work.

  • Finding carriers who will actually quote your lane, which usually means asking people you have used before and hoping one of them covers it.
  • Waiting. A quote request goes out and then nothing happens, and there is no way to tell the difference between a carrier who is working on it and a carrier who has binned it.
  • Comparing prices that aren't comparable. One quote is a single number, one breaks out six charges, one is silent about the things that turn into charges later.
  • Chasing documents through an email thread that also contains the pricing, the address correction and a message about something else entirely.
  • Finding out something went wrong after it has already cost money, because nothing was watching the shipment between pickup and the phone call.

What changes

Software does the coordination. You keep the decisions, because the decisions are the part that needs you.

Sourcing

Carriers get found for you

The platform works the lane rather than your address book. If the carriers on file can't cover it, it goes looking for ones that can, in waves, until it has something to show you.

Comparison

Quotes arrive comparable

What comes back gets read, normalised and put side by side, with what each price does and doesn't include made explicit. That is most of the work and almost none of the fun.

Judgement

A person picks the option

The sourcing is automated. The decision isn't. Someone reviews the candidates and picks the one that gets presented to you, and you're the one who accepts it.

Execution

The shipment gets watched

Stalled milestones, tracking that has gone quiet, documents that haven't arrived. The platform raises those instead of waiting for you to notice.

Who ends up here

Different businesses, same shape.

Importers and distributors

Inbound freight arrives on a schedule someone else sets, and the coordination lands on whoever picked up the phone.

Wholesalers and manufacturers

Outbound freight is regular enough to matter and irregular enough that nobody has built a process for it.

Operations and purchasing

Freight is one line on a job description that has eleven other lines on it, and it is the line that eats the afternoon.

What it costs, and what it doesn't

One flat platform fee per booking, charged when you submit, priced per market. It doesn't scale with the value of your freight.

The fee covers the carrier outreach, the sourcing and the comparison work, whether or not you take the option that comes back. It does not cover the freight itself. Each carrier invoices you directly at the rate they quoted, and you pay them directly — we’re not in the middle of that, which is why there’s no percentage and no markup for us to take. The pricing page has the figure for your market.

When this isn't the right tool

Better you find out here than halfway into a booking.

  • You already have a logistics function with carrier relationships and negotiated rates. You’d be paying for sourcing you already do better.
  • You ship cargo that often gets flagged or has trouble getting through customs. We do source customs brokers to facilitate international shipping, but if your cargo regularly has trouble at customs and that is your biggest pain point, it might be better to bring your own.
  • You need cargo insurance arranged as part of the booking. We don’t arrange it at this time.
  • You’re shipping as an individual rather than a business. Reddlaw is B2B only.

Related: how this compares to using a freight forwarder, what you need to move a pallet, and how it works end to end.

We also wrote up what a logistics department actually does — including which parts of it software genuinely handles, which parts it doesn’t, and the point at which hiring someone is the right answer instead.