New freight marketplace for small, medium shippers

SimpliShip marketplace is designed to help smaller shippers secure ocean and airfreight rates with NVOs and forwarders by having qualified service providers bid on their loads.    A new online marketplace designed to allow small- and medium-sized shippers to bid out ocean and airfreight loads to non-vessel-operating common carriers and freight forwarders went live Monday.
   The marketplace, called SimpliShip, was founded by Cory Margand, a former supply chain executive who found it nearly impossible to procure spot ocean rates in a timely and consistent manner.
   “There was no good way of doing it,” Margand said in an interview with American Shipper. “You’d do it with phone calls and emails to a forwarder. They’d take a couple hours to get rates back, and the rate wouldn’t be in a standard template.”
   Margand estimated he sometimes spent three hours a day trying to get spot rates for his cargo.
   “On the carrier side – it’s not efficient for them either,” he said.
   Margand said SimpliShip will launch with around 10 hand-picked NVOs and forwarders based in the New England area – service providers with which he’s familiar – but the goal of the marketplace is to eventually attract hundreds of such companies.
   Shippers, for instance, can bring their set of forwarders to the marketplace to vie for their cargo in either a private bid setting, or as part of public bid in which any qualified carrier could participate.
   The marketplace is free for shippers, and those that register get access to customizable shipping templates, shipment and rate histories, and carrier profiles. Margand said future functionality will include business intelligence tools that allow shippers to manage their spend and carrier and rates.
   Margand noted that he sees the marketplace as complementary to rate and contract management tools like Freightos, Catapult, and CargoSphere.
   SimpliShip is not the only such development in the market in recent months. In March, another neutral online freight rate marketplace, Haven, launched in the market. Haven focuses on ocean rates, and connects shippers directly with ocean carriers in a marketplace environment.
   Haven Chief Executive Officer and Founder Matt Tillman said in an interview with the Journal of Commerce earlier this year that carriers can decide a rate that they are comfortable providing service, and shippers using the platform can factor in service elements like transit times and port rotations into their decisions.
   Tillman said part of the challenge of getting carriers to migrate to a marketplace environment is assuring them the technology has evolved to a point where it won’t drive down rates in general.
   Another marketplace, Shipstr, has designs on being the Expedia of shipping and is set to launch in the fourth quarter of 2015.
   SimpliShip, meanwhile, has designs on being a tool to help refine the global spot market procurement process.
   The benefit of these marketplaces for NVOs and forwarders is clear – to connect them with definable loads from previously unreachable shippers in an electronic way that doesn’t tax their sales team.
   The platform functions like this: a shippers puts a load out to bid and all qualified NVOs, forwarders, and carriers in the marketplace are notified of the bid, unless the shippers has specified it wants a private bid with a select group of NVOs, forwarders, and carriers.
   Margand said the marketplace is funded by collecting 2 percent of the transaction amount from the NVO or forwarder once it has secured a winning bid.