First, Understand How Your Transporters Charge You

Before you negotiate with your transporter, you need to know how your transporters rate their charges. Here are the following consideration your transporter normally takes to rate your transport charges:-

1. Distance - the further the destination point from the pick up point, the higher the transport rate, or vice versa.


2. Volume - the more volume you have per delivery, the cheaper it is per unit goods
   
3. Weight - the heavier your products, the higher the transport rate or vice versa


4. Size - the bigger your products, the higher the transport rate or vice versa


5. Frequency - the more frequent the delivery order, the better transport rate you can get.


6. Value of products - the more valuable your products are, the higher the rate you'll get or vice versa (it usually applies to consolidated items).

These are the basic things you need to bare in mind before you negotiate with your transporter with better rate. So read on for further tips.

How to Choose a Good Transporter?

OK. How do you look for good transporter? Immediately, I would recommend my own company to you.. haha. Anyhow, you also need to do your due diligence to ensure that your transporter can fulfill the following 6 criteria:

1. Rate, of course: Sometimes if the rate is slightly higher than other, it's recommended to give it a try too, maybe that transporter can give much more valuable services to you
2. Company history: For safety purpose, is your transporter long enough in the market? Will they be the problem run-away type? Is it safe to let them handle your delivery? If one company is in the market for more than 30 years, you can rest assure that they must have done something right to be in the market for so long.
3. Facilities: Do they own their fleet of lorries or they just rely on outsourcing transporter? If they outsource to others, normally the rate is higher due to certain mark-up for their margin and in addition, they have lesser control on the lorries. Furthermore, the outsourcing transporter will normally not put your delivery in their priority because they have their first hand customers to deal with too. When it comes to peak season, your delivery will be at risk for delay.
4. Goods Collection: Do your transporters do door-to-door service? If yes, do they normally come to pick up your goods on time? If the transporter always come in late to collect your goods, say after your working hour, that will incur OT cost for your company. So you need to rate your transporter whether they will collect your goods early.
5. Prompt Statement: How fast your transporter can return the stamp-signed copy of your DO? Because that will affect your own payment collection too. The faster you receive your statment, the faster you can get your money from your customers. So, the transporters have played a major role in here.
6. Management: Are your transport closely monitor your delivery? Do they communicate or respond to you promptly? Are they good at solving your problem?

If your transporter fulfill the above basic criteria, keep them and work with them. Otherwise, it's time to look for other transporter.

Picking the Right Truck Saves Money

If you have stackable items (usually light weight items) and you are going to charter one full truck, lorry or trailer, make sure they ask for the canvas type as shown below:

The advantage of canvas truck is that the height of the cargo can be adjusted flexibly. You can easily ask the transporter to raise another foot up. Let me show you a simple calculation:

Normally lorry, truck or trailer comes with 20ft, 30ft and 40ft with the width of 7.8ft. Say, simply ask the transporter to stack another foot high, you can earn an extra 156 c.f., 234c.f., and 312c.f., respectively, without extra charge. That is also equivalent to roughly RM90, RM140 and RM180 worth of space, respectively.