Freight forwarding is one of the most significant aspect of logistics services, one of the major facets of Third Party Logistics for handling exports, imports and intra-country goods movement. A freight forwarder or a Freight forwarding company near me is a person or a company that manages the movement of shipments from the seller to the buyer. The seller could be a manufacturer, an exporter, a distributor, a trader, a merchant exporter, or any party that has the license to export or trade their goods to buyers or importers in other countries. The buyer could be an importer, distributor, trader. The freight forwarder manages the core and cumbersome processes for forwarding and movement of goods like obtaining and comparing freight quotes from the air and ocean carriers and service providers, arranging pick-up and deliveries, storage and warehousing, documentation and compliances, insurance, liaison, and approvals from trade authorities and so on.
The freight forwarders have contracts and price agreements with the airlines, shipping lines, road transportation providers, and other service vendors. Hence, in addition to all the freight forwarding services provided by the freight forwarders, the owner of the cargo gets discounted pricing and costing from them.
There are different freight forwarders for different modes of freight transportation. There are separate freight forwarders for air cargo, ocean cargo, road freight and rail freight. However, there are some big freight forwarders who provide multi-modal freight forwarding services. These freight forwarders act as a one stop for planning your cargo on air freight, sea freight, road, or rail freight. In addition to just getting the prices of various carrier options for your cargo, the freight forwarders also provide value added services like arranging pick-up and deliveries, carrying out complete freight documentation, like preparing Air Waybill, Bill of Lading, Shipping Instructions, etc; making arrangements for the necessary approvals and authorisations from various trade bodies and Government bodies; arranging for customs brokerage; customs filing and data transmissions at airports or sea ports, and so on.
While there are many MNCs and big freight forwarders who provide most 3PL logistics services under one umbrella, but still getting involved in freight forwarding is a very painstaking and time-consuming process. The major reason behind this is that most of these freight forwarding service providers are largely disintegrated and unorganized. There are thousands of freight forwarders in India who provide logistics services but dealing with them is a cumbersome process as their workflows are still manually driven. Hence, for an outsider or a commoner, the procedure would seem like a highly complicated work.
Anyone who is seeking logistics services usually has to deal with multiple vendors, especially in the non-metro cities. The owner of the goods must approach separate vendors like a vendor for transportation/ pick-up, another for warehousing, another for freight forwarding, another for customs clearance, and so on for both origin and destination. At the end of the day, the owner of the goods or his company is at the receiving end with a lot of co-ordinations, phone calls and emails, just to understand the whereabouts and status of their cargo. Furthermore, at the end of the logistics transactions with all these vendors, the owner of the cargo (shipper/exporter) must deal with multiple bill invoices, after chasing each one of them badly for invoices for days.
Hence, like other services freight forwarding must also have online gateways from where a customer can easily carry out their logistics requirements. There is a unique online portal which offers multi-modal logistics services from single gateway, known as Zipaworld. Zipaworld offers live market rates 24×7 for international, Air freight shipping and domestic logistics services. One can easily check and compare competitive rates for air freight, ocean freight, road freight and even avail express courier services. Once the query is fed into the portal, then you need not worry about the complicated processes. The complete freight forwarding process is contained in 5 simple steps and takes very less time as compared to the time-consuming traditional workflows. The freight documentation like Airwaybill, Shipping Instructions, Bill of Lading, etc is fully automatic and gets prepared based on the details available. Moreover, live tracking is available for 24×7 for the cargo booked on Zipaworld. One can book their cargo as per their requirement like airport to airport, or door to door and the complete task is taken care of by Zipaworld. The best thing is that at the end of the day, one gets single bill invoicing for one or more logistics services availed. Also, the bill invoice is automatically generated and remains available in your account in e-docket which can be accessed any time. All the documentation related to any transaction remains available in the e-docket and hence there is no chance of misplacing important documents. Zipaworld also offers multiple online payment gateways.
Conclusively, Zipaworld provides exclusively digital freight forwarding services that is unparalleled and unmatched in terms of convenience, comfort, cost-effectiveness, time-efficiency.
