Newsletter 42

A new entrant has emerged in the online freight exchange market, offering the tantalising prospect of 75 per cent cost reductions for users. It is ukbackloads.com, and is run by a company called Avant-garde logistics (no connection to the fashion logistics company with a similar name based in the UAE).

The team behind it is headed by former courier David Brown and web developer Gareth Hoyle, and they are pitching their proposition particularly at people selling “collection only” items via online auction sites such as eBay. Users can place non-time critical consignments on the site free, and couriers then collect them as backloads.

Carriers pay a fee for access to the service – a model that some exchanges have found more popular than the percentage approach taken by early exchanges. Prices start at £12.50 a month. Mobile users will be able to log on remotely via handheld devices.

After a competitive scramble in the early 2000s to set up online exchanges, the market has stabilised, and a few strong contenders such as Courier Exchange/Transport Exchange now tend to dominate.