Uber Freight expands into the less-than-truckload (LTL) market

Shippers looking to book LTL on Uber Freight’s Shipper Platform will be able to compare quotes across FTL and LTL within a single platform

Uber Freight has led the industry in delivering crucial flexibility to address shippers’ growing demands and carriers’ evolving needs. Uber Freight built a marketplace that makes freight easier and more accessible, introduced one-touch booking at fixed rates, and pioneered real-time pricing and capacity APIs. With technology designed to meet our customers exactly where they are, we’ve helped thousands of shippers and carriers transform their supply chains and strengthen their businesses. 

Today, Uber Freight is continuing to scale our suite of solutions by expanding into less-than-truckload (LTL) freight, providing shippers with a single platform to support their full truckload and LTL needs—furthering our goal of becoming a one-stop-shop solution for shippers. 

“After a year of unprecedented volatility, choice and flexibility are more important than ever to shippers,” says Lior Ron, Head of Uber Freight. “Just as we did with the full truckload market, we’re using all our marketplace technology and data science expertise to bring much-needed transformation and new opportunities to LTL. It’s a segment of the industry that is not only in high demand but also furthers our journey to support shippers across first-to-final-mile logistics.” 

The LTL market is extensive, catering to shippers of all sizes that often require LTL services to keep their goods moving on time. But there’s room for efficiency improvements: today’s LTL market offerings are clunky and are limited for small and medium-size businesses that often have to navigate multiple logins and touchpoints on antiquated LTL websites in order to ship their freight. In addition to limited visibility, market constraints and increased demands, businesses are often met with continued challenges in the LTL market.

Uber Freight’s LTL offering will help ease these challenges, allowing shippers to manage all their freight needs through one single portal. By opening up the shipper platform to support LTL, we’ve given shippers a direct connection to our growing and reliable marketplace of full-truckload carriers and a leading group of LTL carriers, offering real-time access to market prices and capacity. Shippers can also utilize LTL loads as an environmentally-friendly shipping option to promote sustainable strategies across their businesses. 

To bring an LTL solution to market quickly and reliably, Uber Freight is leveraging technology infrastructure and LTL expertise from BlueGrace Logistics, one of the largest third-party logistics providers with significant scale and experience in the space. 

Shippers looking to book LTL freight will be able to:

• Rapidly compare quotes across FTL and LTL within a single platform
• Receive quotes based on item details, pickup and delivery locations, and dates 
• Select from a list of LTL carriers directly within the platform 
• Schedule pickups and deliveries
• Manage LTL billings 
• Track shipments end to end

H&M USA Inc., a premier ingredients distributor based in New York, has been using our new LTL offering and is seeing promising results.

“As an ingredients distributor to the nutritional, food, and pharmaceutical industries, there are many instances where our business doesn’t need to fill an entire trailer. The ability to now book LTL directly within the Uber Freight shipper platform means that we can rely on one solution for all of our shipping needs,” says David Qiu of H&M USA Inc. “Be it FTL or LTL, Uber Freight removes anxiety from the tendering process. The experience is efficient, flexible, and transparent, and I always feel confident that our business’s goods will be shipped in a timely and cost-effective manner.”

SecondSale.com, a resale company based in Montgomery, Illinois, where customers can sell books online, has also used our new LTL offering and is seeing early success.

“Since our beginnings in the early 2000s, we’ve prided ourselves on being customers’ premier neighborhood bookstore with an online presence,” says Bill Martlink of SecondSale.com. “We purchase millions of titles every year, in addition to tracking over 10 million titles daily to ensure the best market price for every book we offer. Now that we can utilize Uber Freight’s LTL offering, we have a logistics solution that matches our needs, drives efficiencies, and ensures we can provide the best service to our customers.” 

LTL has become one of the most requested features since the shipper platform’s inception in 2018. This expansion is another step toward building our vision of transforming logistics for businesses of all sizes, especially after a turbulent year of increased shipment volumes and stretched capacities across the industry. As bookings continue to accelerate, our technology and integrations will continue to support the market’s growth and innovation into the future.

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