LTL Transportation and The Amazon Prime Effect

This image is attributed to Hadrian / Shutterstock.com

The Amazon Prime effect is taking hold on the freight transportation industry and it’s putting pressure on LTL trucking companies to speed up their delivery times.

We recently talked about the rise of e-commerce business in a blog post Online Retailers: The 5 Benefits of Using a 3PL. That post stated that e-commerce sales made up 7.5% of retail sales in 2015 and is expected to continually increase. LTL carriers are working hard dealing with how to respond to this increase.

For example, FreightCenter’s partner carrier, YRC Worldwide just announced that they’ll be offering an expedited service that will reduce transit times by one or two days. This service will also be available to FreightCenter’s customers.

Making LTL transportation faster is not an easy feat, though.

LTL, or less-than-truckload freight transportation deals with the movement of goods that are too large to ship through a parcel service, but not large enough to fill a truck. Because of this, multiple LTL shipments going to multiple locations are loaded on one truck and taken to a freight terminal where they will be reloaded with shipments going to the same general location.

As you can imagine, the organization of LTL shipments requires very streamlined logistics. While carriers and 3PLs have sped up the coordination of these logistics with transportation management systems, it’s difficult to speed up the actual transportation of the goods. Expedited services, such as YRC’s, help shave off transportation time by loading priority shipments onto trucks ahead of standard shipments.   

While it will be a long time before we can expect to see delivery times as impressive as Amazon Prime’s two-day shipping in the freight industry, it is nice to see that carriers are “stepping up their game” to provide their customers with faster delivery times. Especially now, considering they’re also under pressure from rising labor costs and new regulations.

FreightCenter is proud to work with carriers, such as YRC Worldwide who are dedicated to providing the best services catered to online retailers. To learn more about our nationwide network of carriers and the services they offer request a quote today. 

FreightCenter also offers its own proprietary services for e-commerce businesses.