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Freight Forwarding Innovation for Amazon Sellers

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Amit Rosenthal, CEO of Proboxx, shares his thoughts on the latest technology and innovation in freight forwarding with a focus on Amazon sellers. You’ll get an insight into why freight forwarding was stuck in the 20th century and needed to be brought up to date to rapidly give Amazon sellers the information they need so they can cope with fast-moving market conditions. He also sheds light on GPS tracking for shipments and if it’s helpful for smaller businesses, and why so many Chinese freight forwarders going bankrupt these days could spell trouble for you if you’re a customer.

 

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How and why freight forwarding needed to go from old-fashioned to cutting edge.

Amazon sellers are used to working with one of the most innovative tech companies, but freight forwarding is very old-fashioned with many people going back and forth in multiple emails, so there was a huge disconnect between this method of working for them and the streamlined and sophisticated dashboards filled with stats and data that Amazon offers. So updated freight forwarding systems feature a dashboard for sellers where they could manage their quotes and shipments, automate processes, and get information for a lot of different SKUs being sold. This makes life much easier than juggling endless emails and allows sellers to work more professionally. (06:03)

 

Why not knowing their shipment’s arrival date at the distribution facility can make life difficult for sellers.

Most professional Amazon sellers base how they sell around their new product shipments’ arrival dates to the FBA facility. The freight forwarder will provide the shipping line identity and container number and sellers can use it to identify when the specific container was dispatched and when it is supposed to be delivered to the port, but aside from that there is a black hole where the seller does not know when the shipment will arrive at the end destination, such as the FBA facility, as this isn’t provided by the sea shipment company as it’s not their responsibility. This leaves sellers at a disadvantage because without knowing a firm arrival date, they’re running PPC campaigns to sell more and also trying to manage their supply chains and tweaking prices in order not to run out of stock before the products are replenished…except that they don’t know exactly when that will be which makes life difficult.

Updated freight forwarding systems solve this problem as they collect the data from the different 3rd party subcontractors about when the shipment has cleared customs, is on its way to the destination, and then has been delivered, and update it to your dashboard for your reference. (13:20)

 

How do Amazon sellers plan their sales?

For sellers who rely on Amazon to fulfill their goods, it is important to deliver the goods to Amazon’s FBA facility when there is an agreed appointment to do so. For FBM, fulfilled by merchant, sales, it’s perhaps more flexible but the onus is to get the products to the 3PL facility at the most convenient time based on the seller’s product launch plans. (19:21)

 

Are GPS trackers for the products in a container helpful?

This may be more suitable for large retailers who ship multiple containers filled with high-value products per month. For Amazon sellers, it doesn’t seem to have caught on yet, and it could lead to information overload as knowing a container’s precise position at all times is less helpful than knowing when the seller can expect the goods to arrive in their possession.

From a trust perspective, if you are tracking shipments in this way because you’re worried about the freight forwarder’s ability to get them to where they need to be or if they’re being honest about where and when the shipment will arrive, it may be worth finding a new forwarder! (22:31)

 

Many small freight forwarders set up in China since around 2020 are going bust, how does this affect overseas customers?

During the pandemic freight costs ballooned and people were buying more online leading to a huge demand for China-made products, so many Chinese businesspeople aggressively set up boutique freight forwarding companies to try and get a slice of the pie. They went to shipping companies directly and agreed to contracts to ship many containers per month to be granted a good price that they could then make a profit on, but also had to pay in advance for the allocation. From China, this could be, say, a commitment to 1,000 containers shipped out at US$10k per container, and to ship 100 per week, so that’s US$1m per week to the shipping line. As demand and shipping costs started to dip more recently the forwarders were left having to pay for their commitment even though they were not filling their allocation, so many filed for bankruptcy as they couldn’t cover the agreed costs. If sellers were working with them when they went bust and had active shipments in the shipping lines’ hands, the lines would often seize the containers until they were paid and some shipments were even destroyed. This shows the importance of sourcing an established freight forwarder and thoroughly checking their history and credentials. (26:33)

 

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