The freight transportation industry has evolved into a highly fragmented, multi-billion dollar marketplace with thousands of freight providers and an infinite variety of companies that need to move their goods across North America and overseas. Ask any shipping manager and you will probably hear the same lament: It's a jungle out there.

Bruce Adams, parts manager for the Mid-Atlantic Engine Supply Company, says the process of finding carriers and scheduling shipments usually involves time-consuming cold calls, faxing and endless rate negotiations, not to mention the administrative costs of sending information to carriers, completing required documentation, maintaining records and managing bill payment. For years, this labor-intensive process was simply the only way to get it done. Fortunately for managers like Adams, the emergence of e-commerce has delivered an alternative solution.

freightquote.com, founded in 1998 by CEO Tim Barton, brings together freight carriers and companies that have goods to move by offering business-to-business freight and logistics services in an online environment.

Clients register for a free account online, enter their shipping requirements in a standardized query form, and instantly receive quotes from several different freight carriers from all over the country. With a few clicks, clients can select providers, schedule shipments and print bills of lading. A freightquote.com account also enables users to track shipments and pay invoices online, and it features a database that stores shipping logs and product lists to facilitate record keeping and save time when scheduling repeat shipments.

In addition, clients can access the service through ThomasRegional.com at Thomas Regional Freight Quotes® Thomas Regional Freight Quotes. By integrating the freightquote functionality with its web site, Thomas Regional has not only introduced thousands of users to the service but also offered them an additional time and money saving tool that complements its many core services.

Barton had been working with a telecommunications company that he developed when he began to notice similarities between the freight and communications industries. He was familiar with the complex, tedious processes involved in shipping freight and decided there might be a better way. His insights, coupled with an understanding of the Internet's structure and its potential as a business tool, helped Barton conceive the model for what would become freightquote.com.

Barton and his team developed and implemented freightquote.com as a comprehensive service that simplifies all aspects of the shipping process by utilizing the Internet to make it easier to find carriers and schedule shipments. As a result, time-consuming chores like phoning and faxing inquiries, waiting for carriers to send quotes and shuffling stacks of paperwork are nearly eliminated.

freightquote.com went live in 1999, having developed relationships with freight carriers, a customer management system, billing and collections procedures as well as sales and lead generation systems. Building the entire system up-front helped Barton differentiate freightquote.com from the handful of other companies competing for a share of the emerging online transportation market. Barton cites the speculative dot-com bubble of the late nineties as the driving force behind many companies who claimed to offer the same services as freightquote.com.

"Because we built everything ahead of time, we could focus on filling up the pipes. We were already off and running whereas everyone else was either wobbling or focusing a lot of their time on developing things they hadn't really built yet. When the bubble burst, they needed more funding. Timing helped us because we were definitely a good year ahead of all of the latecomers," says Barton.

Bruce Adams from Mid-Atlantic Engine Supply can tell you what a difference that year made for his shipping department. By the time Adams decided to try the free freightquote.com service and entered his requirements online, the system had evolved into the freight solution he was looking for. He immediately received quotes from fifteen different freight carriers, compared prices, selected a provider, scheduled pick-up and printed a bill of lading, all in one session. According to Adams, "freightquote is so easy to use, it is self-explanatory. You can do everything at the same time."

Joe Faustini, production control manager for AmTech Engineering, reports similar results. "Since AmTech started using freightquote.com, the service has helped us save thousands of dollars in shipping costs…we plan to continue using the service because it helps save time," says Faustini.

Barton says the company is seeing an estimated 20,000 transactions per month, 80% of which are conducted online. In conjunction with strong sales efforts from the freightquote.com team, this momentum accounts for an approximate 50% growth rate this year alone, with similar growth projections for 2003.

freightquote.com has established relationships with over 4,000 freight carriers ranging from obscure regional outfits that benefit from the national exposure freightquote affords, to major carriers who deliver worldwide. This network of providers also translates into real cost savings for freightquote.com users. Barton estimates hard cost savings of anywhere from 5-25%, along with additional soft cost savings of roughly $58 per transaction.

The freightquote.com user base encompasses a multitude of industries and ranges from small companies producing specialty products to larger shops manufacturing engines and machine castings. Essentially, anyone who needs to ship heavy items is a potential freightquote client. As Barton says, "Systems are dynamic enough to accommodate any sized business."

Barton believes that the key to continuing success for freightquote.com is staged growth. "You've got to pace yourself," he says, "Not everyone realizes that. You are encouraged to be everything to everyone today, and at Internet speed. It is better to do your core business well, than to try to be all things to all people."

Instead of promising services that have not yet been built or expanding into markets they cannot realistically accommodate, Barton says freightquote.com "built the broader functionality piece by piece over time. All the guys who said, 'Yeah, we do it all,' really were only working on it all. Trying to spread yourself too thin is a detriment. We only recently started offering inbound international service and our next component is ocean container services." Additionally, freightquote.com has developed enterprise solutions for larger companies and now enjoys an exclusive relationship as freight provider for e-Bay.

Barton says freightquote.com will continue to rely on the principles and practices that molded a start-up dot-com into the industry leader it is today. "Our general corporate culture is to be regular people and to be helpful. Freight is not the cleanest industry where everything works perfectly. When something goes wrong, all you can do is help correct it. We try our best to put a more helpful face on the industry." Judging from the responses of users like Bruce Adams and Joe Faustini, freightquote.com is doing just that.