News / Uber Freight launches spot market tool as it aims to be a one-stop shop

© Timon Schneider

Uber Freight has taken another step to expand the functionality of its Exchange procurement platform for shippers and truckers, with a spot market module that combines search, bidding, upfront pricing, automated tendering and booking functions.

Exchange: spot is the latest step in Uber’s effort to establish itself as a one-stop shop in the highly fragmented trucking market.

It harnesses Uber Freight’s Carrier Web portal and Freight Allocation module for book-it-now load pricing, bidding and automated tendering.

Recommendations, which are tailored to truckers using the platform, carry additional information about shipments that load boards typically don’t provide, such as the type of commodity and ratings of shippers’ facilities fed by truckers into the Uber Freight database, said senior product manager Ran Sun.

She added that carriers would not have to make blind bids on the platform, as they received information on bids in progress, including rate offerings.

The system can also offer recommendations for loads for backhaul and it allows bundling of spot shipments into mini contracts. Uber Freight launched Exchange: contract, the corresponding contract procurement tool, last September.

With these features the company aims to boost its traction with carriers as well as shippers as the go-to platform to place and find spot shipments as well as conduct contract procurement.

For truckers, finding loads via multiple load boards is time-consuming, involves disjointed communication and often leaves them with a sense that they may not have got the right loads for their trucks, said Eric Berdinis, head of carrier product management at Uber Freight.

However, ultimately the essential question for truckers is how many potential loads and shippers the platform captures. The new offering kicks off with existing customers. During the summer Uber Freight’s Transportation Management clients – some 200 shippers – will be brought onto the platform, followed by the rest of the brokerage base. Next year it will be offered to new clients.

Mr Berdinis feels that the existing customer base alone gives the platform a strong impetus for traction.

“I’d say even with the load volume that we have from just the brokerage, there’s already a critical mass of engagement and retention to keep the marketplace humming along with very minimal intervention,” he said.

Expanding the shipper base will be the main focus for growing the platform’s reach, though.

“We already have 95,000 carriers using these products on a day-to-day basis. We feel the reach into the industry is very well established on the carrier side,” Mr Berdinis said.

The adoption of the contract module also gives rise to optimism. From its launch last September, Exchange: contract has grown to give more than 900 carriers access to hundreds of millions of dollars of freight, and it has experienced a sevenfold quarterly increase in lanes quoted, according to Uber.

Currently the contract and spot modules are accessible through in different interfaces, but they will be combined, Mr Berdinis said. This will mean more than just one fewer tab, creating network effects, he added.

Uber Freight has been one of the founding members of the Scheduling Standards Consortium, and it was first out of the starting blocks with a new scheduling API designed to the new standard launched in February. Test prior to the launch showed loads made available using the API with zero human intervention were ready for coverage as much as 75% faster than manual scheduling, the company reported.

The full release is planned for the second half of the year.

“We aim to roll it out to carriers by the end of the summer,” Mr Berdinis said.