Small Forwarders Don't Lose Ocean Freight Bids on Rate Alone

From the Pricing Desk · Part 1

Most small forwarders I talk to have the buy rates to win the business. What they don't have is a

pricing desk.

A shipper sends over a 60-lane ocean RFQ in their own Excel template, with their own column names, and it's due in ten days.

At a large forwarder that file goes straight to a tender team whose only job is bids. At a 20-person forwarder it lands on the same two people who are also answering spot quotes, chasing bookings and fixing a rolled container. Something has to give, and it's usually the bid.

Where Ocean Freight Bids Actually Get Lost

I built and ran a global pricing team, and I've spent more than a decade managing RFQs at the largest scale. The bids we lost almost never came down to the ocean rate alone. They came down to the work around it.

The customer's template eats the week. Somebody is copying rates line by line out of carrier contracts and into the shipper's columns, and that's exactly where the mistakes happen. A surcharge lands in the wrong column, a port gets spelled two different ways, a per-B/L fee gets multiplied by the number of containers. Procurement teams notice, and it follows you into round two.

Round two is its own problem. The customer comes back with targets and the desk rebuilds the bid in a new spreadsheet with half the time. Last year's bid usually lives in somebody's inbox, so when the contract comes up for renewal nobody can tell you quickly what you won, at what margin, on which carrier.

That's a process problem more than a rate problem, and process is where a small team can actually compete with a big one. Shippers are running tighter and more frequent bids than they used to (more on how shippers are approaching freight procurement in 2026), so the forwarder who answers fast and clean gets a real look.

Large Forwarders Win Ocean Bids on Discipline

From the big-forwarder side of the table, you see how many tenders are won on discipline rather than genius. Everybody prices off one charge structure, the lane list is clean, every assumption is written down and round two gets turned fast. That discipline comes from headcount and expensive systems, and thus most small and midsize forwarders are still running the same process on Excel and email.

They deserve the same discipline without the headcount. That's why we built TenderTrail.

What We Built: TenderTrail

TenderTrail by Sherpa is freight forwarder pricing software built for purpose, a rate management and pricing engine for RFQs and spot quotes. It was designed by operators and is backed by an expert IT consultant. We're not a tech company guessing at how freight gets priced. We've done the job.

On the desk it works like this:

• Your carrier rate sheets go in as they arrive. Every charge gets captured, and anything TenderTrail can't place is flagged for a person to decide. Nothing gets guessed.

• The same rates, charges and rules are built to price a 60-lane tender or a same-day spot quote, so your spot quotes don't undercut your own contract pricing.

• Every lane is priced charge by charge, with cost, margin and sell for each carrier option. Sales can quote off a minimum and a suggested sell rate without ever seeing the buy rate, and the customer never sees either.

• It shows its work. Every quote says what's included and what isn't. An expiring rate, a missing charge or a price below cost gets flagged, and somebody has to sign off on it. A lane with no valid rate gets flagged as uncovered. It never gets priced off a fallback.

• The shipper gets their own template back, filled in, with only the answer cells touched, so their formulas and formatting survive.

• It's being built for analytics at the trade lane, carrier, RFP and organizational level, for pricing and procurement, by people who spent a career reporting on this data to management at the largest freight companies.

The First Pilot: FCL From Asia Into the US

We're starting with one trade and doing it well: full container load ocean freight from Asia into the United States. That's where a lot of small forwarders make their living, and where the RFQ templates are the heaviest.

A working prototype already covers the forwarder workflow end to end, and the current work turns it into a secure, multi-customer product. The people testing it are industry experts, best-in-class operators who know exactly what a pricing engine has to get right because they've done the job without one.

Door delivery and global lanes come next. They're on the roadmap, not in the first pilot, and they'll get their own posts when they're ready.

What's Coming in This Series

From the Pricing Desk runs alongside Sherpa's consulting posts. Each one takes a problem pricing desks fight every tender season, from customer templates and carrier rate sheets to all-in rates, spot quotes, round two and margin. I'll walk through how good teams handle it, then where TenderTrail fits.

You don't need TenderTrail to use the advice.

Want In Early?

We're talking with a small number of forwarders about the pilot. If you quote FCL from Asia into the US and your tenders still live in Excel, join the TenderTrail pilot list.

And if the bigger issue is your pricing structure, your sales process or your tender team, that's what Sherpa's Commercial Growth consulting is for.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do small forwarders lose ocean freight bids? Usually not on rate. They lose them in the work around the rate: filling the customer's template by hand, charges in the wrong columns, per-B/L fees multiplied by container count, and a slow round two.

How do large forwarders win more ocean tenders? Discipline. One charge structure everybody prices off, a clean lane list, every assumption written down and a fast turn on round two.

What is TenderTrail? TenderTrail by Sherpa is freight forwarder pricing software, a rate management and pricing engine for RFQs and spot quotes, designed by operators. The first pilot is FCL ocean freight from Asia into the US.