What do you guys think?

Sure, sounds good.
Now IF you can get shippers to go along with it, that would be great.

Martin

 

Been tried, although long before smart phones and Android Apps. Some guy out of the Chicago area came up with exactly the same thing, shippers would post available shipments along with pricing. If you accepted the load it was assigned to you and immediately disappeared off the system. As soon as you delivered and submitted the appropriate proof of delivery with no OS&D the system would make payment within the specified time by the shipper.

I was managing a company at that time and we used it a couple times but it failed within a few months. Quality (decent paying) shippers want to talk to a person so in the end the only stuff that was making it on there was from shippers who didn't want to pay anything and could care less, cheep!

There's another form of it right now, Uship which is basically the same concept except you bid on the loads and most of the freight is LTL and COD.

As for the comments about how much brokers are making and how they are just sitting around taking your hard earned money, I'm not going to beat that dead horse again. I have posted everything in black and white from a brokers perspective before and all I have to say is if you think brokers have it easy and are getting rich on your hard earned money, park your truck and become a broker. I'm no longer a broker, I'm a company driver but I have records from my brokerage back to 1998 that I would be happy to send you and you can see just how much brokers don't make off you.

People are never going to stop trying to find ways to cut middle men out of business. Fact is that there will always be brokers in the freight business no matter how many schemes are thought up to get around them. Companies that want one stop shopping and one person or office to deal with will look to brokers because they don't have the time or resources to have 50 different trucks calling on them for one shipment. They prefer to have a business partner (broker) who gets to know their business, understands what it is they need and when they have shipments, they can make one call or send one e-mail and let the business partner handle all the rest of the work. This is especially true for companies that don't ship large quantities, regular times etc. The big carriers don't have time for them and they don't have the manpower to screen every truck that calls when they post a load. They want to make one call and know that a properly screened truck will arrive when they need it not waste hours upon hours answering calls and trying to do their regular work as well.

Go ahead and give it a try but the instant you tell a shipper your taking the money from their bank account when the truck picks up the load, no matter how secure the escrow or anything else, the call will be over with. Then will come the whole liability issue, who's liable, the smart phone, the truck, the shipper, the receiver, who? Oh and the 2-3%, what about the fee's charged by the company handling the money, they are going to charge every bit of that just for escrow services if not closer to 5% then your going to have to pay someone to handle the flow of data, setting up carriers, setting up shippers, answering technical questions from both sides. When you figure a single person to do all that at lets say $50k per year (good luck finding anyone for that price) your actual payroll expense will be closer to $65k a year so if you only hold 3% and pay out 1.5% for escrow services you will have to handle over $5 Million just to break even but then at that level one person won't be able to handle everything so....... do the math.

 

And this is in the flatbed forum because........................?






I guess cuz we is the best truckers!

 

Likely on here as Flatbedders usually TRY stuff before condemming it

 

Great post catalinaflyer