How to find freight forwarder partners?

Working in an international industry comes with daily challenges, especially when dealing with the freight forwarding industry, am I right? Each country and city has its own particularity, for that reason, it’s important to find good partners to work with around the world.

However, finding good freight forwarder partners to work with is not an easy task, due to the complexity of the industry. It is common to spend hours and hours looking for new forwarder partners and end up unsatisfied with the options you gathered.

The challenges of finding freight forwarder partners

As mentioned earlier, finding forwarder partners to work with comes with lots of challenges, and by mapping out these problems your forwarder company faces, managing a solution becomes easier. 

To help you out, I’ve gathered some challenges you may face trying to find new partners for your freight forwarder business:

1. Find invalid website
2. Find companies that are no longer active in the industry
3. Find forwarders with invalid email addresses and phone numbers
4. Find unreliable partners 
5. The hours spent trying to find a partner to work with

These are some of the challenges I’ve mapped, but feel free to add more to the list. Remember – the more problems you map the easier it will be to choose a solution, and to know where to look for new partners.

What kind of freight forwarder are you looking for?

Before starting to look for a freight forwarder partner, you must know what you are looking for. Since there are many options and lots of specialties you can get even more confused during the process. 

So first things first:

• What kind of services do you need? 

Is it air, sea, rail freight? Do you need a forwarder to move dangerous goods, pharma, perishables, live animals, etc? 

• What country or city do you need to find a forwarder?

Depending on where you need to move your cargo is important to think if it is better to find a global freight forwarder or a local one.

• How much can you spend?

If you are on a tight budget you can resort to a low-cost freight forwarding company depending on what and where you need to ship the cargo.

Ok, now you are all set to start finding new forwarder partners to work with!

How to find freight forwarder partners?

There are some ways for you to look for freight forwarder partnerships, I am going to go through 4 of them:

1. Google:

The most common way to look for new freight forwarder companies to partner with is to resort to our old friend, Google. 

The best way to search for them on Google is to look for “freight forwarder in…” and then you put the country or city you are looking for. 

Try to check multiple websites to see more than one possibility, but be careful to choose, since anyone can have a website these days.

2. Freight Forwarder Directories:

Another option used a lot by the forwarders is the international freight forwarder directory, the difference between them and Google is that inside some of the directories you can be more specific by searching through the category of the service you wish to find forwarders in, such as rail, sea, air freight, warehousing, and more.

You will be able to see a brief description of the companies with some information like the website, the phone number and the address.

In this case, you cannot see a background check of the forwarder, so make sure you choose a good one.

3. Logistics network directories:

At logistics networks, you can find a list of forwarders, where you can search for freight forwarder companies listed on that network. Usually, when you search for the country you wish to find, the results will appear with the company name in alphabetic order.

Once you choose a forwarder you can check their profile on the network, in many of them you can find the website, the cellphone number, and the address. 

Don’t forget to be careful when choosing them.

4. Parnity:

Last but not least, Parnity, the digital logistics network, is an excellent option for you to search for new forwarder partners, find over 150 forwarders in more than 75 countries, and filter the searches by type of cargo, country, city, services, company name, branch office or head office.

Along with that, quote only validated forwarders, and check all documents that went through our transparent validation process.

Not to mention that inside Parnity you can add your quotation requests for other forwarders inside the network to see, and answer requests from other forwarders. Contact forwarders in real-time to exchange quotations and build new partnerships.

Parnity’s idea is to give the freight forwarders complete information about the members, so they can be empowered to choose the best forwarder to handle their shipment.

Remember the importance of checking each partner’s background.

How do I choose a qualified freight forwarder?

Now that you know where to look for freight forwarder partnerships it’s time to learn the best way to choose them. Keep in mind that to find a qualified forwarder partner, you must check their background and invest some time in analyzing them.

For starters, always check their website, see if the information on the “about us” match the services he offers, the city and country that he is located, if there is any contact available, phone or email. 

If possible, check if the forwarder company has any logistics certifications, like IATA, DUNS number, AEO, and so on. And if the forwarder is not listed in FDRS.

Another important step in the analysis is to get feedback from a current partner of the freight forwarding company.

It ends up to be pretty manual work, but Parnity can help you to be a step forward on the analysis. Our digital logistics network gathers all of this information during our transparent validated process that is available to all forwarders to check whenever is necessary. The documents that are collected during the process are available on a feature we call Trust Scan, which allows each forwarder to visualize: 

• certifications, (IATA, AEO, FDRS, and D-U-N-S Number);
• financial records;
• community indicators, which means how many times that forwarder is being considered a partner in Parnity;
• the volume of contacts that forwarder has received from Parnity in the month;
• his Parnity usage, when was the forwarder’s last access to Parnity;
• all the documents that went through our transparent validation process; 
• and all the indications they received from freight forwarders they previously worked with.

Click here to know more about it.

Freight Forwarding Network

You can always choose to be part of a freight forwarding network, which is the same as a logistics network. A group that gathers independent freight forwarder companies from different countries in order to provide an environment to build partnerships and exchange business.

To be a part of a traditional freight forwarding network you must pay an annual membership fee that goes around USD1.300,00 and USD4.000,00, there is no free freight forwarding network. 

If you want to take a step further from the traditional freight forwarding networks, your best shot is Parnity’s digital logistics network, a logistics network updated to today’s market.

Parnity offers a membership with the best price in the market: 

• Membership: costs USD999,00 per year, cheaper than any other logistics network in the industry, and that allows forwarders to do much more – search for as many forwarders as they need, send as many emails and chat messages as necessary to the forwarders you want to partner with (following the anti-spam rule), exchange business with over 150 members in more than 75 countries, talk and be contacted in real-time via chat, have human close support that will help you find the best partners and a guided training towards the system.

Besides all of these benefits, inside Parnity forwarders can also manage and analyze their partnerships through an add-on feature – MyPartners freight forwarder management system – that costs USD576,00.

With Parnity’s management tool, forwarders can organize their current freight partners by uploading their current list of partners and be able to organize them through a board by country, modal, service, quality, or whatever makes sense, it is totally personalized. Ranking forwarder partners can be adjusted according to the criteria your company uses the most. 

Along with that forwarders are able to analyze current partnerships by visualizing the volume of cargo sent to a partner and the volume received, the profit generated with that partner, the amount of business exchanged by month, and which are the criteria (modal/city/expertise) that there is more business being exchanged.

What is the best option?

You got the power now! You know all the steps to finding and choosing a great freight forwarder partner to work with. So it’s up to you to identify the best option.

Keep in mind that to find and choose a new forwarder partner you must look at the bigger picture, so: knowing the challenges you are facing, what kind of services you need, and with that, you will know the way to look for one and make your decision.