Rate Shopping

Rate shopping is the practice of soliciting and comparing quotes from multiple carriers before tendering a shipment. The goal isn't always the cheapest rate – it's the best value when you factor in transit time, carrier reliability, service requirements, and any accessorial costs that might appear after delivery. For shippers managing dozens or hundreds of loads per week, rate shopping manually is one of the most time-consuming parts of the job.

In a manual workflow, rate shopping means logging into carrier portals one by one, requesting quotes by email or phone, waiting for responses, and then comparing numbers in a spreadsheet. Each quote may have different rate structures – one carrier quoting all-in, another breaking out fuel separately, a third adding surcharges that aren't immediately visible. This makes apples-to-apples comparison difficult and slow, and it means shippers often default to the same two or three carriers simply because there isn't time to check everyone.

Automated rate shopping changes this by querying an entire carrier network simultaneously and normalizing the results into a single view. The shipper sees contract rates, spot market rates, and LTL tariffs together, with transit times and historical carrier performance alongside price. This doesn't just save time – it surfaces options the team would never have found manually, especially on lanes where a non-obvious carrier offers significantly better pricing.

The best rate shopping workflows also feed data back into procurement strategy. When you can see which carriers consistently win on which lanes, you have real leverage for your next RFP or contract negotiation – and you can build a routing guide grounded in actual performance, not assumptions.