Black Friday and Cyber Monday: LTL Trucking Success

Black Friday and Cyber Monday can’t happen without truckers.

Black Friday got its name from the custom of retailers to write their losses in red in and their profits in black.  Black Friday is the day that most retailers put the red ink away for the year.  Cyber Monday is a copy for online retailers for the Monday after Thanksgiving – that’s the day that Amazon decided to offer its best deals.  Other online “e-tailers” followed suit.  In 2017, according to Forbes magazine:

More than 56% of consumers surveyed by RetailMeNot said that they plan to make a purchase on Cyber Monday this year, compared with 39% last year. In 2016, Cyber Monday was the largest online sales day in history… shoppers spent a record $3.39 billion online on Cyber Monday last year…

In 2020, total sales on Cyber Monday alone rose to $10.8 billion.

How are those Cyber Monday sales going to get delivered?

LTL Trucking

Over ten BILLION dollars worth of sales on one day means that we truckers have a bonanza on our hands, if we manage it correctly.

Correctly means

1. Proper Planning

It’s not just the big players in the game that have tons to ship during the Christmas season.  Little companies suddenly go viral and into high demand.  Medium companies get their biggest orders from retailers to stock shelves and need deliveries to meet the demands.  Even the mom & pop stores need more stock for their customers.  LTL shipping reaches these customers in ways that the big transportation companies, with all their focus on the big shippers, may not accommodate.

But if you don’t have your plans logically laid out, how will you know which package you should deliver, or even where it should be in your trailer.  Using a load planning software can help you lay out a route that makes sense and makes money for you.

2. Transparent communications

What’s December in the US and Canada without the unexpected snowstorm?  It doesn’t take a blizzard to cause a shipping delay, just one car going too fast and creating a backup that keeps you stuck for hours on the road.  There’s no excuse for not communicating with your shippers when you may be delayed:  you’ve got a phone inside your cab.  You need to keep track of those numbers and have easy access to them.  If they’re stuck in an envelope that fell on the floor and got soaked from melted snow… you’re in trouble.  It’s a lot safer to keep that contact information in your phone in a trucking management software program.

3. Tracking Invoices

LTL trucking and shipping isn’t for the accounting challenged owner-operator.  The details of an invoice aren’t more complex, really, but there are so many more of them to manage.  If you’re still a paper-based trucker, this could lead to some serious complications if you lose papers, or even just one BOL.  I’m not here to say that old school doesn’t work – but I will say that using your smartphone to manage your LTL shipping paperwork makes it far simpler.  Just take a picture of the signed BOL and send it to the shipper as proof of delivery.  You’ll need the shipper’s email address – that would be in the trucking management software too.

 The Secret to LTL Trucking Success

It’s about organization.  We know from experience that organization will make or break a trucking company.  It’s also the single biggest problem that owner-operators face.

That’s why TruckingOffice Pro has been especially designed for the LTL trucker.  We’ve got a load planning workspace to help you organize your freight and your routes.  The billing module handles the complications so you don’t have to.  And all of it can be done from the cab of your truck.

The secret to success is using the right LTL trucking tools.  TruckingOffice Pro has all the tools, already integrated.  You don’t need anything else to run your trucking business.

Not sure yet?  Let us help you decide.  We’ll give you a free trial of TruckingOffice for you to decide how you can capitalize on  this holiday shipping season.  Then, when the new year roles in and you have to think about the IFTA and all those different states and all those different miles, we’re pretty sure that you’ll want to keep that data where you can use it to run a FAFSA report in seconds.  That’s the real power of the right trucking management software like TruckingOffice.  It’s not just about one thing – it’s about everything.

• Invoices
• Account management
• Maintenance
• Load planning
• Routing
• IFTA
• IRP
• Customer lists

We said free trial – and it’s for everything, not just the part of the system we want you to see.  You can try out all of our features and discover for yourself the success of LTLtrucking is in the software.