The Load Nobody Actually Has

Last week I picked up the phone and called a well-known European freight exchange.

I'd been sitting on this frustration for a while and I wanted to give them a chance to explain themselves.

Here's what had been happening.

Every time I post a load on the main German platform (the market leader), everyone in European road freight knows which one I mean…within minutes, five identical loads appear on the Polish exchange. 

Word for word. Same route. Same commodity. Same collection and delivery points.

Marked up €20–30.

I tested it properly. I posted a load on the German platform and watched the Polish one. 

Five copies appeared in under five minutes.

Then I reversed it. Posted on the Polish exchange first, then checked the German one.

Nothing. No duplicates.

That told me two things.

First, it's not automated or at least not entirely. The speed suggests people are sitting there, watching the German platform, and copying loads manually the moment they go up.

Second, it only flows one direction. 

The German platform is the source. 

The Polish one is the destination.

What This Actually Is

Let me be clear about what's going on here, because some people in the comments tried to dress it up as normal brokering which it’s not…

A freight forwarder has the freight. They manage the movement. They take responsibility for the shipment.

These companies don't have the freight. They've copied a load post they don't own from one platform and pasted it onto another, hoping a truck bites before the original poster finds one.

They're not freight forwarders. They're arbitraging leads they don't own.

Nobody has a truck. Nobody has the shipper. Nobody takes real responsibility. Everyone just takes a cut.

The carrier gets squeezed on rate. The shipper pays more than they should. And somewhere in the middle, three or four companies are collecting €20–30 each for doing nothing except copy and paste (which doesn’t make sense)

What the Platform Said

When I raised this with the freight exchange directly, the response was essentially: "We can't do anything. It's not illegal."

That's true. It's not illegal.

But let me tell you something interesting. After I posted about this publicly on LinkedIn, the platform deleted my comments from their own page.

If that's how you handle transparency, just imagine who's actually on the other end when you hand over your freight.

The reason exchanges won't act is straightforward: their revenue comes from monthly subscription fees. The more members they have, the more revenue they generate. Whether those members actually have freight or are just farming loads from another platform doesn't change the subscription fee they pay.

They have no financial incentive to clean this up.

That's the uncomfortable truth.

The Compliance Risk Nobody Mentions

One of the comments on my post raised something I want to put on record here, because it doesn't get enough attention.

When you have this many layers of subcontracting, nobody knows who's actually moving the freight.

You gave the job to company A. Company A gave it to company B. Company B posted it on a different exchange. Company C picked it up, and they found a truck through company D.

Who has liability? Who holds the CMR? Who do you claim against if the cargo is damaged or goes missing?

If each of those companies holds freight forwarder insurance, the claims process becomes a chain of finger-pointing that can take months to resolve. If any of them don't  or if they're operating under a name that doesn't match the insurance  you may have a problem that's much bigger than a €20 markup.

How to Spot It (and What to Do)

In the comments, a fellow freight forwarder made a point that stuck with me: you can usually tell from the email.

A copy-paste arbitrageur sends templated, rushed emails. 

They won't know details about the load that they should know. 

They may struggle to answer basic questions about the route or the collection procedure. 

They respond fast (too fast!!)  because they're running this across 50 loads at once, not managing one relationship.

The rating system is the main tool platforms give you to vet these companies.

That's imperfect, a company can build up a decent rating before you interact with them, and a bad experience doesn't always translate into a public review.

My approach is to work with carriers I've verified directly. If I'm using a freight exchange to find capacity, I look at the company profile, the tenure on the platform, and whether their email addresses match their company registration. 

A carrier operating out of Poland whose domain was registered three weeks ago should give you pause.

This won't catch everyone. But it filters out the worst of it.

What Needs to Change

The freight exchange model is built on volume. More posts, more users, more subscription fees. Transparency and quality control cut into that.

Until the business model changes (until platforms derive value from the quality of transactions rather than the quantity of members),  this practice will continue. 

The platforms know it happens. They just don't have a financial reason to stop it.

The change I'd like to see is exchanges verifying that the company posting a load actually has it. A simple confirmation from the shipper or a reference number that ties back to a real booking. Not perfect, but it would make the copy-paste arbitrage significantly harder.

Whether that ever happens is another question.

For now, the burden falls on us, the people actually doing the work, to verify who we're dealing with before we move a single box.

What's your experience with freight exchanges? Have you run into this kind of load farming? I'd be curious to know whether you've found a reliable way to screen for it.

While one of their own drivers is blocking a truck at Rotterdam port because he hasn't been paid in seven months.

The driver's name is Parviz.
He's from Tajikistan.
He says the company owes him at least €30,000.
He lived in the cab for two years. Didn't see his family. And when he finally stopped the vehicle and refused to move the police backed him up....
He had the right to stay.

The company denied everything, said wages were paid per contract.
Meanwhile, the recruitment team was on a plane to São Paulo.
I've been in European road freight long enough to know this isn't a one-off.
Cross-border trucking has a structural problem that nobody wants to talk about openly: the further a driver is from home, the more leverage the employer has: Visa dependency.

It creates a power imbalance that some companies exploit, and others simply don't notice until it blows up in a Dutch port.
The Brazil angle makes it worse.

The pitch to drivers there is straightforward: European wages are higher than Brazilian wages, so it's a win for both sides.

Maybe...(?) If you actually pay them.
I work with hauliers regularly.
Most are decent operators trying to keep trucks moving in a market that's squeezed from every direction.
But I also hear the stories (drivers owed back pay), promises not kept, contracts that look clean on paper and mean nothing in practice three time zones from home.

Because in this industry, word travels fast. Drivers talk.
Freight managers talk and a company's name in those conversations is either an asset or a liability.

What do you think? Is this a driver welfare issue, a management failure, or just the symptom of an industry that's been underfunded for too long?

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Everyone says freight forwarding is hard to break into.

But breaking in is the easy part.

You find a customer and a carrier. 

You sit in the middle and coordinate. 

The first shipment moves. 

You get paid.

Simple, right?

Staying alive past year two, that's where most people get it wrong.

Along the way, I've watched good freight forwarders go broke. 

People who “knew” the Incoterms. 

People who “handled” customers well. 

People who genuinely “understood” the job.

They failed anyway.

And almost every time, it came down to the same handful of reasons, none of which had much to do with freight itself.

This is what I wish someone had told me before I started.

Reason #1: Cash Flow Kills Before Competition Does

This is the one that gets people most often, and it's the one nobody prepares you for.

Freight forwarding has an ugly financial structure. 

You pay first. You get paid later. Every time.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

Your customer sends you a shipment. 

You quote them £2,000. 

They accept. 

You book the carrier, pay the trucking company, cover the customs fees, arrange the documentation.

All of that happens now.

Then…Your customer pays you in 45 days.

Meanwhile, next week there's another shipment. And the week after, another…. Each one requires you to pay out before you collect.

That gap  (the space between what you've paid and what you're owed)  is where freight forwarding businesses die.

I've seen forwarders with strong volume and empty bank accounts. 

They were technically profitable on paper. In reality, they couldn't make payroll.

What to do instead:

Collect before you pay. As Yoda would say  “Collect Payment you must”

This sounds obvious, but most new forwarders are afraid to ask for it.

For a first shipment with a new customer, payment upfront is not unreasonable. 

It's standard. You don't know this person. You're taking on financial exposure on their behalf. They can pay you first.

As the relationship builds and trust is established, you can extend terms (if your piggy bank allows it)

NET 7, NET 14. But NET 30 or NET 60 for a brand new customer? 

That's a risk you don't have to take.

My rule from the beginning: money in first. I've never apologised for it.

Also: know your working capital ceiling. Before you take on a new client or a big shipment, ask yourself whether you can absorb the cost if payment is delayed by 30 days. If the answer is no, either get paid upfront or pass on the shipment.

Passing on business you can't afford to finance is not weakness. It's how you stay solvent.

Reason #2: One Customer Is Not a Business

When I started ALINNZA, I had one customer. My former employer. 

They trusted me, they knew my work, and they gave me their freight.

That was intentional. I needed to prove the model worked before I spread myself thin trying to build a client base from scratch.

But…I never stopped at one.

From day one, I knew that one customer was a liability I had to eliminate. 

Because a business built on a single client isn't a business, it's a dependency, you feel the pressure as if you’re their employee instead of their supplier..

I've seen this pattern destroy companies. 

One customer grows to 50% of revenue. Then 70%. 

Then the customer gets acquired, finds a cheaper option, or simply goes quiet for three months while cash dries up.

There's no leverage at that point. 

You can't negotiate. 

You can't walk away. 

You need them more than they need you.

What to do instead:

Set a rule early: no single customer accounts for more than 30% of your revenue. 

When one gets close to that threshold, use the stability they provide to go and find the next one.

This is uncomfortable when things are going well. 

That's exactly when you need to do it.

Diversification isn't just about having more customers. 

It's about having different types of customers across different trade lanes, different modes, different industries. If road freight slows down, air freight might be steady. If one sector pauses imports, another might be ramping up.

Build the spread while you have the breathing room. Don't wait until you need it.

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Reason #3: Underpricing Disguised as Competitiveness

Most forwarders who struggle are not failing because the market is bad. They're failing because they can't make money on the business they're winning.

The logic that gets people into trouble sounds reasonable: price low to get the client, then raise rates once the relationship is established.

It doesn't work that way. Customers who come to you on price stay because of price. 

The moment you try to increase your margin, they go back to the market. 

You've spent months servicing low-margin shipments for a client you can't afford to keep.

I set a rule early: minimum £150/€150 profit per shipment, or 30% markup  (whichever is higher).

That rule has cost me clients. Good clients, or so they seemed at the time. But every one of those "lost" clients would have dragged my margins down and kept me too busy to find better ones.

What to do instead:

Know your floor before you quote. 

Every shipment has a base cost  (the carrier rate, the customs fees, the admin time, the liability exposure). 

Before you put a number in front of a customer, know exactly what you need to make it worth doing.

If the customer won't meet your minimum, let them go. 

Say it politely. "That's not something I can do at that price, but I'd be glad to work with you when the volumes change." 

Sometimes they come back. More often they don't, and that's fine.

The forwarders who race each other to the bottom don't win. They just die more slowly.

Reason #4: Compliance and Documentation Errors

This one is more operational, but it's caused more damage to more forwarders than people realise.

A wrong HS code. 

An export declaration filed incorrectly.

A missing licence for a controlled good. 

A CMR with errors that nobody catches until the truck is at the border.

These aren't just inconveniences.

 They result in customs holds, fines, delayed shipments, and customers who never come back.

When you're handling freight across borders, you're operating within a regulatory framework that doesn't forgive carelessness. And the penalties don't scale to the size of the mistake, a small error on a routine shipment can cost hundreds or thousands.

What to do instead:

Build checklists. Before every shipment, run through a standard set of checks: Is the commodity code correct? Are the export documents complete and accurate? Does the value declared match the invoice? If there's a licence requirement, do you have it confirmed?

This sounds basic. You'd be surprised how many forwarders skip it because they've done the same lane a hundred times and assume they know it.

Reason #5: Scaling Before the Foundation Is Ready

Growth sounds good. 

Revenue going up, shipment volume increasing, new customers coming in.

But I've seen forwarders scale straight into collapse.

They added new trade lanes without the carrier relationships to support them. 

They brought on new customers without the operational capacity to serve them properly. 

They hired without the cash flow to sustain payroll through a slow quarter.

The problem isn't growth. The problem is growth that outpaces the structure underneath it.

What to do instead:

Before you add a new trade lane, ask whether you have a reliable carrier partner for it. Not one you've quoted through an online platform  (an actual relationship with someone you trust).

Before you bring on a new major client, ask whether your current team can handle the additional volume without service quality dropping for existing customers.

Before you hire, ask whether you have at least three to six months of their salary in available cash, regardless of what the revenue projections say.

Growth at the right pace builds a business. Growth at the wrong pace builds a liability.

The Honest Summary

I'm not going to tell you freight forwarding is easy because it’s not….

But the things that kill most freight forwarding businesses are not freight problems. 

They're business problems like any other business around us. 

Cash management. 

Customer concentration. 

Pricing discipline. 

Compliance rigour. 

Controlled growth.

None of these require industry experience to get right. They require you to treat your operation like a business from the first day.

If you're just starting out, or if you've been running for a year and some of this feels uncomfortable to read, that discomfort is useful information.

Fix the foundation before you worry about anything else.

If this was useful, share it with someone who's thinking about starting their own freight forwarding business. And if you have questions or want to discuss your situation, leave a comment below, I read every one.

Freight Shipping Master Substack (Link)

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In 2020, I was trying to grow ALINNZA’s road freight business in Europe.

Brexit was coming. I knew UK-EU trade lanes were about to explode.

The problem? I had customers who needed trucks, but hauliers I’d never worked with before didn’t trust me.

Every time I called a Polish or Romanian carrier for a quote, the conversation ended the same way.

“Pay in advance.”

Of course they said that. Nobody knew me. And out there, there are 40,000 freight forwarders in Europe alone (most of them nobody’s ever heard of).

Why would a haulier extend credit to a small company?

I understood their position. I just couldn’t afford it.

At least not always.

The cash flow problem nobody talks about

There’s a conversation new freight forwarders never have before they start, and it costs them dearly when it finally arrives.

It goes something like this:

Your customer gives you 10 FTL shipments a month. Each one costs £1,000. That’s £10,000 in freight you need to pay before you’ve collected a single pound from the customer.

You might be able to cover one shipment out of pocket.

Maybe two. But ten? Thirty?

That’s a different problem entirely.

I see people online talking about startup costs, company registration, software subscriptions, a website.

And yes, those matter.

But the real financial pressure in freight forwarding isn’t setup. It’s working capital. The gap between when you pay the carrier and when your customer pays you.

Banks will sell you a loan.

Factoring companies will take a cut of every invoice.

I’ve never been a fan of either.

There’s a better way. And I found it by accident.

Read full article on Substack: https://thefreightshippingmaster.substack.com/p/how-can-you-make-extra-money-from