Hello, I would like to some insight from all you heard working drivers out there. On the load boards you are searching for freight on what is the one thing you wish that website would offer? What would you change? What would make it easier for you? Please advise
I had this long novel length post typed out about brokers and the bad practices I'd want them to change, but after seeing the OP was talking about websites not actual people I had to get rid of my whole rant. One of the major things I'd like a load board site to do is place in its terms of service that all loads listed show the ACTUAL city the load is at. Not the nearest major city, or major landmark, but the actual city it is at. When doing load planning for 11 drivers having to track down the real location of the shipper is a very unneeded extra step.
I'd like to see fuel prices along the route. I'd like to see tolls along the route. I'd like to be able to easily search for partial shipments within x miles of my route. Say I have a 30' load going from SF to NYC. I'd like to know in 1 click that there are 4 pallets available in Winnemucca going to Omaha (instead of manually searching for loads out of every city on i80). I would like to see an elevation profile of the trip. I want to see credit score & days to pay for shipper/broker. I want to be able to click on the shipper/broker/agent & see what else they currently have posted. Might even be nice to see what they've posted in the last week or so. I would like to see historical rates for that lane and the lane going back -- without having to do a separate search. Bonus points if you use an algorithm to automatically suggest the 3 most profitable triangle routings based on last 30/90 days rates (e.g. if I click on a load going from SF to NYC I'd like to see the average rate for SF to NYC, from NYC to SF, and the 3 most profitable cities to take a load & unload/reload from NYC that ultimately go to SF -- maybe NYC to ATL to SF or NYC to CHI to SF, etc). Bonus bonus points if it automatically displays the overall "round trip" rate per mile for each option. I would like to see a current load to truck ratio for my origin city (bonus points for showing ratios for destination cities too). I, as a driver, would still like to be able to see what trucks are posted in my area to get a feel for my competition. It would be swell if with 1 click you could see the broker's minimum carrier requirements & maybe even a link to download their carrier packet. It would be great if you listed loads by agent and booted bad actors from your boards (agents who knowingly post misleading information time & again). A reputation system for individual agents (& perhaps on the other side - for individual trucks) would be helpful.
Put the actual name of the shipper/consignee other than disguising for instance Walmart as many of us would rather avoid them.
Can you cite an example or two? Just curious. I didn't think a broker would publicly announce who the shipper was, or some trucking co. might just call the shipper themselves instead of the broker.
Sometimes you can guess who the shipper or receiver is or Google and figure it out just based off what they've post. It has been suggested in the past that for this reason TQL posts ghost loads to mask who the real customer is.
Not if you don't pay extra. Sounds like he wants features brokers have. Being able to see who is posted around you is agood one. We used to have that feature but not aanymore.
