Load Tendering

Load tendering is the formal step where a shipper offers a shipment to a carrier and asks them to accept it. The tender includes the essential details – origin, destination, pickup and delivery dates, commodity, weight, equipment type, and the agreed rate. It's the handshake that moves a planned load from "ready to ship" to "assigned to a carrier."

Tenders are transmitted electronically via EDI (typically EDI 204), API, carrier portals, or – in less mature operations – email and phone calls. The carrier responds with an acceptance or rejection. In routing guide environments, a rejected tender triggers the next carrier in the waterfall sequence. The speed and reliability of this process directly affects pickup performance: slow tendering means late pickups, missed appointments, and cascading delays.

For shippers managing high volumes, tendering efficiency is a multiplier. If a logistics coordinator spends five minutes per load on manual tendering – selecting the carrier, entering details into a portal, confirming the rate – that's hours of daily work that could be automated. More critically, manual tendering introduces errors: wrong rates, incorrect pickup times, missing reference numbers that cause issues at the dock.

Automated tendering – where the system sends the tender with one click after the shipper confirms the carrier selection – compresses this step to seconds and eliminates data entry errors. The best systems also auto-generate accompanying documents like BOLs and advance ship notices at the moment of tender.