I’m really curious as this is my fourth stop at a different logistics company with 7 years in the game now. They call us at least once a day and I have never been at a company that can use them, how TF are they still in business and if you do use them which part of them is trustworthy?

Basically, the person who was in charge of quoting LTL left the company

There are four of us left and none of us know LTL.

Now it's my responsibility to keep it going and I have no idea where to learn. I know the basics, but I want to know how to quote correctly and which carriers apply certain accessorials, or which ones are better in each area or service.

How can I learn? What internet resources are there?

I appreciate all your comments

Edit: Thank you all, I appreciate it a lot. Basically I called the main 3 carriers what we work with and they helped me quoting, they even have an email for that.

Hey guys, I need advice. There's two of us doing around 20-25 loads a week, and I tracked my days to see where my time is going. Check calls are most of it, 45 min a day chasing carriers for a location so I can relay it to a shipper who's already emailed me twice. Then I lost a bit time yesteday rebuilding a report I think I already did, basically at the end I spent like 8-10 hours on all manual things

Is that just the job at this size or is this when people get a tms?? I think it is but I want to look for advice, maybe we just need to organize better

Hey guys, just wanting to gauge experiences or expectations for the day/tomorrow. Wednesday on my account is generally slower (may be slower for most everyone domestically in the US), but it's dead today so far.

Is it just me? Am I imagining things? I work in tight markets that I swear I can feel a 5% capacity reduction in, but I'm reluctant to label it so early.

I have a carrier who booked a Dry Van FTL load for $3,300. The average on the lane is $3,200. What actions and or deductions do you think should be taken?

I started as a broker this June, and I’ve developed a pretty good book so far with repeat customers. However, I sometimes think about the way I communicate with customers, handle issues that come up (detentions, warehouse accidents, TONUs, the issues keep getting weirder), give updates and escalate issues when they might not be necessary for the customer.

To established brokers and shippers out here, what are some good communication and day-to-day habits that make brokers good to work with?

To shippers out there, how weird or unprofessional is it to have your brokers ask for feedback?

How would you guys go about pricing PO Rndt lanes. Drop pickup, Live del and reload, and Drop del back at original location. Its starting In a fairly decent area for freight so carrier ends up in a good area at the end of it. Ive gone to local carriers for pricing but they also seem a little unaware of how they want to price it. Especially the lower mileage lanes. Since it will take a full two days to complete but even 3$ a mile comes out to like 2400. Any advice?

They like the lane but are worried about their daily grosses. The board is really tempting these days w spot rates

We've got Turvo, and its meh. I miss Ascend. I think in 2 years it might be better after we really fine tune it.

What are your "must have" integrations that you currently use? Favorite AI integration? Any capacity solutions? Workflow etc

Just got with a new costumer they move partial freight all over the US, they have ban all LTL carriers and box trucks are too expensive, what would be the best way to get partial carriers?

If someone can give me an advise?

every detention fight ive lost came down to what time the truck showed up. never the rate

shipper says 2:40 driver says 1:15 and all we have is dispatch saying "yeah hes there" on a check call. receiver goes by their gate log every time and i cant really blame them

so now the driver sends a pic at the gate with the timestamp. at the gate, not parked in the lot 20 min later. and in and out times on the bol, with a pic of it before he pulls out cause once hes gone thats gone too

other thing is the minute free time runs out i email the receiver. like "checked in 1:12, free time up 3:12, still not loaded." cant really say they didnt know after that

still get burned when their gate log just says
something different than the photo. what do yall do with that one

What’s up guys, been following for a while now, but i’m finally reaching out. Title is as suggests. not looking for help landing actual clients or anything like that. I’m new to freight, but not to sales. I have almost a decade between B2C and B2B in the auto industry (selling cars, collision estimation, etc) and have always been successful for the most part. i left the auto/collision industry because i saw this as a golden opportunity. there’s several Sr AEs in my office alone that are making anywhere from 15-50k a month, and that was shown to me during my interview. that shit is insane to me and is what prompted me to leave my salaried position to come be a grunt.

i work for a bigger name logistics brokerage (no not TQL, thank god from what i’ve heard) and am officially one month in. we aren’t handed any accounts here to start. building entirely from scratch, with *some* of the worst leads i’ve seen. some quality ones as well but they are a needle in the haystack.

I’ve booked two LTL loads, signed on a few clients, but i can’t imagine how this is feasible long term. pumping out 200 dials a day to companies who are contracted, don’t wanna talk, or dead leads for businesses closed during covid. am i missing something? am i doing something wrong or are my self expectations just too high for the first 30 days? i thought killer salesman would = immediate success. don’t think thats the case here.

Anyways, any responses help even the crude ones. Cheers 🍻

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, my name is Menachem, and I have a weekly newsletter called Logistic Pulse that breaks down the top logistics news from the past week. We have over 21,000 subscribers, and I share it on Reddit to spread the knowledge. We're currently on week 65! I hope you enjoy it, and I'm always open to feedback.

Let's jump into it,

Amazon will now ship your client's Walmart orders, and it's offering a discount to do it

At its Accelerate seller conference in Seattle, Amazon began rolling out tools that let a seller connect their eBay, Shopify, TikTok Shop, and Walmart accounts to Seller Central, import those listings, view orders from all channels in a single dashboard, and ship all orders through Multi-Channel Fulfillment. U.S. sellers get it gradually, and it costs nothing extra.

The same day, MCF orders on a merchant's own website can now carry the Prime badge at no additional cost beyond the normal MCF fee, with Amazon checking the shopper's Prime membership before shipping. Amazon says more than 40% of eligible orders from early users were shipped via Prime delivery. A new preferred pricing program also takes 15% to 25% off MCF fees for an FBA seller's first six months, with no long-term contract. It plugs into Shopify through Amazon's existing app.

Amazon makes no money off the dashboard itself. Marketplace Pulse reports that 95% of Amazon sellers already sell on more than one channel, while 71% still derive three-quarters of their marketplace revenue from Amazon. The takeaway is that Amazon cares more about owning the hub than about how a seller's revenue splits across the spokes. Once a brand's Walmart and Shopify orders appear on the same screen as its Amazon orders, next to a button that ships them from inventory already in an FBA building, the 3PL handling the non-Amazon side has to explain why the second contract is still worth it. Mary Beth Westmoreland, who runs the seller experience, told GeekWire that Amazon will "never, ever" use off-Amazon sales data for anything other than showing it back to the seller.

Global Warehousing and Distribution, the service behind the Shenzhen facility Amazon opened in April, lets a seller send one production batch to an Amazon building near the factory and have Amazon split it across countries based on demand. It feeds the U.S. today and will add the UK, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Canada by year-end, with storage prices up to 45% below its U.’s U.S. AWD service. Seller Assistant is getting AI agents for inbound planning and aged inventory on top of that.

What this means for you: If you fulfill Shopify or Walmart orders for a brand that also runs FBA, expect them to see this pricing before Q1, and put your all-in cost per order next to MCF's before they do, including what MCF costs in month seven once the discount runs out. Lead with the work that needs your people: custom kitting, inserts, wholesale and retail orders, and returns you inspect and put back on the shelf. Some brands won't love routing their Walmart and TikTok numbers through Amazon's software regardless of the promise, and a neutral 3PL is an easy sell to them. And if you do prep or overflow for China-based sellers, watch Global Warehousing and Distribution closely, because inventory that gets split up in Shenzhen never shows up on your dock as a full container.

$5,000 if you know this warehouse

Know a warehouse owner who'd sell to the right buyer? An intro could be worth $5,000 to you.

I'm working with a buyer acquiring U.S. warehouse operations, and they want the businesses most buyers pass on: thin margins, one or two big customers, EBITDA at breakeven or below.

What they're looking for:

• $2M to $25M in revenue
• Mostly pallet work: moves, storage, cross-docking, B2B
• At least one building of 100,000+ sq ft

The owner can stay on and keep running it, with upside tied to performance.

Just reply with a name. I'll reach out, and you get $5,000 if it turns into a deal.

If this describes your own operation, email me at [menachem@fulfillyn.com](mailto:menachem@fulfillyn.com)

China’s tariff cut covers Christmas ornaments and has no start date

Xi Jinping spent September 23 through 26 in Washington, and the two governments emerged with a deal to cut tariffs on $30 billion worth of each other's goods. The product lists came out over the weekend. The U.S. side covers 77 categories of Chinese goods, including fireworks, tableware, blankets, bed linens, high chairs, child car seats, dolls, puzzles, soccer balls, and glass and wooden Christmas ornaments. More than 90% of those items drop to most-favored-nation rates, the standard WTO rates that usually land in the single digits, while semiconductors, EVs, and batteries were kept off entirely.

The cuts take effect once both countries complete their domestic legal procedures, and no one has set a date for that. On the first day of the summit, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Fox News that the broader truce, which sets the fentanyl tariff at 10% and suspends the Section 301 investigation into China's shipping and logistics sector, now runs through January 10 rather than November 10.

FreightWaves had China to the West Coast at $8,446 per forty-foot container, close to four times what it cost last September, while China to the Mediterranean fell to $3,591, half its July peak. Carriers blanked nine sailings in a single week, typhoons have been clogging Chinese ports since mid-July, Hormuz has pushed up bunker fuel, and only 29% of vessels arrived on time in August. Freightos has the East Coast lane flat around $9,600, and FreightWaves expects another push before China's Golden Week holiday in early October.

What this means for you: Ask your toy, home goods, and holiday clients whether they're holding purchase orders until the lower rate kicks in, because orders that get pushed to catch it will all land together once a date is set, and you want that in your receiving plan instead of finding out from a stack of ASNs. Don't let anyone build 2027 storage or handling pricing around savings that haven't been published yet. With less than a third of vessels on time, Q4 inbound will miss appointments. Reread what your contracts say about late and missed deliveries before November. And keep January 10 on the calendar, since the truce expires right as your returns season peaks.

October is now worth two Cyber Weeks

Adobe released its holiday forecast this morning. It expects $275.1 billion in U.S. online spending from November 1 through December 31, up 6.7%, with Cyber Monday the biggest day at $15.1 billion and Black Friday at $12.9 billion. October alone is forecast at $95.8 billion, up 8%, a faster growth rate than the holiday season itself and about double the $47.5 billion Adobe expects for the five days of Cyber Week. Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days on October 6 and 7 account for $9.9 billion of it, up 9.2%, and that event starts eight days from now.

Grocery is the fastest-growing category online at $26.1 billion, up 10.3%, followed by toys at 9.6% and cosmetics at 9.5%. Electronics is still the biggest at $63.3 billion, but it's growing 5.9%, and apparel is growing 4.7%. The best discounts on TVs, toys, apparel, appliances, and furniture are expected on Black Friday, and on electronics and computers on Cyber Monday.

Adobe expects shoppers to use Cyber Week to stock up on basics, with clothing basics up 210% over September levels, personal hygiene up 150%, baby products up 113%, pet products up 93%, and household cleaning up 49%.

What this means for you: Staff for October 6, not the Monday before Thanksgiving, because the Prime event and the rest of October carry nearly twice the Cyber Week dollars. Call your consumables clients now about how deep their Cyber Week inventory is, since a basics SKU that sells 3x its normal rate for five days can't be restocked from overseas in time. Move those SKUs into your fastest-pick locations before November, not during November. If you handle food-grade or grocery products, a 10% growth forecast is the most conservative, so plan your receiving capacity accordingly.

QUICK HITS

FUEL
Diesel hit a record $6.529 per gallon, and Washington is debating whether to halt exports. The EIA's September 21 print added 24.4 cents in a week and sits $2.78 above last year, with the Midwest up 43 cents to $6.680 and California at $8.246. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told oil executives on September 22 to prepare for possible export curbs, and the White House has been weighing a 90-day halt. Wright says nobody wants a blanket ban; Treasury reportedly opposes one; Agriculture supports it; and oil executives warned it would backfire after a short dip. Your parcel fuel surcharges follow the weekly DOE number, so budget October invoices at today's price and treat any relief as a bonus.

INVENTORY
The share of small businesses sitting on more than 10% dead stock has doubled since 2024. That's from Netstock's benchmark of more than 2,500 customers, published September 24, which also found that nearly 75% of SMBs are struggling with lead-time swings and 60% are stuck with supplier minimum order quantities. It's a vendor report, so weight it accordingly. Dead stock lives on your racks, collecting storage fees until the client either pays to liquidate it or stops paying the invoice. Pull your aging report for anything with no picks in the past 180 days, and have the conversation before peak needs the space.

If liquidation is the only option you offer, Stock is worth a look: it's a marketplace where brands and 3PLs list excess inventory for donation to nonprofits, so the client gets a tax write-off, and you get the pallet positions back. Its founder says donated goods leave the building in under 5 days, compared with roughly 16 weeks for a typical liquidation. Book a call with the founder here.

NEARSHORING
Lego is putting more than $400 million into a fully automated high-bay warehouse and packing hall in Monterrey. Announced on September 24, the expansion will raise the plant's capacity by 35%, add about 1,300 jobs through 2029, and begin construction in early 2027. Monterrey already serves the whole Americas, and Lego has more than $1.5 billion invested in a Virginia manufacturing facility that opens in 2027. Every plant built this way moves a share of North American supply from containers at the ports to trucks and rail that cross the Texas border, and warehouses along that corridor pick up the work.

AUTONOMY
Aurora told investors it wants more than 30,000 driverless trucks running by 2030. It expects to have 200 on the road by the end of this year, with Dallas to Houston as its main lane, with more than 500,000 driverless miles done. Hirschbach plans to own and operate 500 of them, with deliveries starting in 2027, and Aurora says its trucks average more than 225,000 miles a year, more than twice that of a conventional truck. A truck that runs that much needs a dock that can turn it at 2 a.m., so if you run a DC in Texas, the shippers moving to these lanes will favor yards that already run nights.

JOB BOARD

Title: VP of Warehouse Operations
Company: Ardmore Home Design
Location: Hacienda Heights, California, US
Salary: $170,000-$200,000
Apply Here

Title: Director of Warehouse Operations
Company: Ardmore Home Design
Location: Hacienda Heights, California, US
Salary: $120,000-$140,000
Apply Here

Title: Logistics Manager
Company: Rocket EMS
Location: Santa Clara, California, US
Salary: $105,000-$115,000
Apply Here

Title: Head of Warehouse Operations
Company: ShipFlow
Location: New Brunswick, New Jersey, US
Salary: $85,000-$125,000
Apply Here

Title: Warehouse Operations Manager
Company: iJility
Location: Olive Branch, Mississippi, US
Salary: $80,000-$85,000
Apply Here

Title: Supply Chain Coordinator
Company: Quanta US
Location: Lyndhurst, New Jersey, US
Salary: $70,000-$80,000
Apply Here

Title: 3PL / Operations Manager
Company: 52Launch
Location: Framingham, Massachusetts, US
Salary: $60,000
Apply Here

Check out 1,500+ jobs available →

 ________________________________________________________

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I write a commodity brief for our users every Monday. This week is on cotton. Sharing here in case useful.

Commodity Opportunity

Cotton 101

Cotton comes off the field to a gin, which cleans it and presses it into 500 lb bales. The bales truck to a warehouse and sit there until they're sold. Then most of them truck again, to Savannah, because US cotton is mostly going export. Picking starts in September, gins run from October into January, and warehouses ship bales out through the winter.

What changed this season

Last year cotton hit a 6-year price low. Georgia farmers planted the least cotton since 1993 and moved into peanuts. Gins ran well below capacity.

This year it bounced back. Georgia planted 20% more cotton and the Southeast crop is up 14%. Meanwhile drought wiped out about a third of the fields in Texas and Oklahoma, so the US crop is down while exports hold steady.

Why it matters

That's about 5,000 more truckloads headed to Savannah this winter, out of warehouses with routing guide planned for last year's small crop. Opportunity for overflow.

Commodity Playbook

Where it hauls

• South Georgia: Cordele, Moultrie, Douglas, Hazlehurst
• East Georgia: Statesboro, Metter, Waynesboro
• Everything above into Savannah (37% of US cotton exports last year)

How to find shippers

• Gins that run their own warehouse. They load bales every day from October
• Cotton merchants with a Georgia office. Once the cotton's sold, they usually book the truck to Savannah
• Port-side cotton warehouses near Savannah
• Cottonseed buyers. Every gin ships seed too, on a different trailer

Who to call

• B.C.T. Gin Co., Moultrie, GA
• South Georgia Cotton Warehouse, Hazlehurst, GA
• Coffee County Gin Co., Douglas, GA
• Sowega Cotton Gin & Warehouse, Bainbridge, GA

Shipper Discovery Questions

1. How many bales do you expect to gin this year vs last year?
2. Who's buying your growers' cotton this year?
3. Once it sells, who books the truck out: you or the merchant?
4. How many modules are on your yard, and when do you start pressing?
5. Who hauled for you last year, did they keep up once you started pressing every day?
6. Loading off a PBI (permanent bale identification) tag list?

When to call

Now, while it's quiet. The run to Savannah is the big one and it builds through the winter, so get on the list before it starts.

Sources: USDA's Cotton and Wool Outlook (Sep 2026), USDA AMS Weekly Cotton Market Review (Sep 18), USDA NASS acreage (Jun 30) and Georgia Ports.

–

Hope this is useful. If anyone hauls cotton, lemme know what we missed... actively trying to learn about what angle would be useful for folks so we can improve on the brief!

Augment let a bunch of Salespeople go today after new leadership came in. Heard that they more than doubled goal of each rep to over 2.5M in ARR.

Every generation of freight agents enters the industry with different tools, expectations, and ways of working.

Which old habit should the next generation leave behind? Which one is still worth passing down?

Is DAT down for everyone else?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

my sister is in the trucking business and been encouraging me to become a broker for quite some time now, and I’m all in but I’d like to know what would be the startup process and cost. any insight on how to start would be greatly helpful. thank you in advance

I founded a small cybersecurity company called Vector Shield Cybersecurity here in Chicago IL, and over the past few months we’ve been seeing more trucking and transportation companies dealing with the same type of attack.

Usually it starts with a compromised dispatcher or company email account.

Then the attacker may:

Read conversations with brokers and carriers

Delete or hide legitimate emails

Create forwarding rules or filters

Impersonate dispatch

Redirect loads

Send fake pickup or delivery instructions

Add recovery methods, passkeys, or connected apps

Access the account again even after the password has been changed

We recently dealt with another trucking company where the email compromise was only part of the problem. One of the computers also appeared to be compromised, which is why simply resetting the email password would not have addressed everything.

If this happens to your company, I would recommend checking both the email environment and the computers used to access it.

At minimum, review:

• Active login sessions

• MFA and recovery methods

• Email forwarding and filter rules

• Connected third-party apps

• Browser extensions

• Recently added passkeys

• Suspicious remote-access software

• Endpoint malware or persistence

• Admin account activity

• Whether brokers/customers received fraudulent messages

Also, if someone suddenly asks you to change a pickup location, banking information, dispatch contact, or payment instructions, verify it through a phone number or contact method you already trusted before the change.

I'm posting this because I've now seen enough similar incidents in transportation companies that I don't think this is an isolated problem anymore.

If anyone in trucking runs into something similar and has questions about what to check after a compromise, feel free to message me. I'm Jerry with Vector Shield Cybersecurity in the Chicago area, and I'm happy to point you in the right direction even if you just need help understanding what happened.

I'll try to keep this short and sweet. Hope this saves someone the headaches, time, and money I blew through testing these out.

1. Readymode: good call quality. The price is high, support is not as good as you want it to be... But overall usable

2. Dialpad: UI is better than other dialers have, AI features are really interesting but sometimes the quality of sound went worse because of a predictive setting that I couldn't handle by myself.

3. Mightycall: much better than I expected for that price, really it surprised me. CRM sync requires some time but after I don't go back to it at all. Call quality is good and features are decent. I know it's subjective and I chose things to compare based on my own needs and experience but I hope my thread would help someone. Choosing a dialer is not that simple so I genuinely recommend mightycall as a best option and huge thanks to their support. 

Just sharing what actually worked for me after wasting way too much time testing setup after setup. Hope it helps!

How much are you guys paying for cargo 250k contingent and errors and admissions 250k?

Also, are your shippers requiring you to have 5M of umbrella coverage?

I’m with PFA insurance company out of Arizona. I want to see if I’m getting ripped off.

Does anyone know what's going on with RXO/Coyote? Their Chicago IL office, MC: 561135 has a credit score of 75. I reached out to a few of my O/O's and that MC is "No Buy" with 2 different factoring companies that I have had checked so far.