Multi-Stop / Multi-Drop Shipment

A multi-stop or multi-drop shipment is a single truck route that includes stops at two or more pickup or delivery locations. Instead of a standard FTL point-to-point move, the driver makes sequential stops – picking up freight from multiple origins before heading to a destination, delivering to multiple consignees along a route, or both. It's a strategy for maximizing trailer utilization when individual orders don't fill a full truck but are geographically compatible enough to share one.

Multi-stop shipments require careful load planning. Freight must be loaded in reverse delivery order so each stop's freight is accessible without unloading and reloading the entire trailer. Pallet dimensions, weights, and stackability all factor into whether a multi-stop plan is physically feasible – not just geographically logical. Each additional stop also adds time to the route for loading, unloading, and potential waiting at appointments, which affects both transit time commitments and driver hours-of-service compliance.

Pricing for multi-stop shipments typically involves a base truckload rate plus per-stop charges – often $50–$150 per additional stop – along with potential detention charges if any stop takes longer than the allotted free time. The total cost should be compared against the alternative: shipping each drop as a separate LTL or partial shipment. Multi-stop often wins on cost when stops are reasonably clustered, but it introduces delivery timing dependencies – a delay at stop one cascades to every subsequent stop on the route.

Building efficient multi-stop routes requires knowing your order volumes, delivery locations, appointment windows, and product dimensions at the order level. The shippers who do this manually in spreadsheets either under-consolidate (missing savings) or over-consolidate (creating routes that are physically impossible or violate appointment windows). Automated load consolidation that factors in all these constraints is where the real savings emerge – one Owlery customer reduced their weekly truck count by 32% through optimized order consolidation.