Descartes Broker & Forwarder Enterprise Systems
New: Descartes Spot™
Helping freight forwarders return 90% of quotes in under 30 seconds
Helping You Win Business with Faster Quoting
Many shipping decisions are time-sensitive with rates needed as quickly as possible to meet deadlines, finalize sales orders, or compare options quickly. With customer expectations for near-instant pricing, the fastest quote often wins the business, even if you are not the least expensive. Descartes Spot incorporates the latest spot rates effortlessly via our smart Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The result is faster quotes with an eye to customer value and forwarder margins to help you better compete.
Zero Rate Maintenance Required
Freight rates change frequently with evolving fuel costs, carrier surcharges, and seasonal adjustments. With zero rate maintenance, our solution frees forwarders from continuously managing rate tables. Descartes technology sources, applies, and manages rates centrally to save you time and effort.
Broader Customer Choice
The solution delivers the latest spot rates and a range of shipping options and trade routes, providing customer choice and value.
Delivering the Features You Require
Descartes Spot provides instant visibility into carrier spot rates through direct API integrations with carriers, helping you compare market options, generate customer quotes, and secure freight capacity.
Intuitive Quote Building
A simple point pairing provides multiple shipment options with full spot rates listed including all associated fees and surcharges.
Multiple Shipping Options
Easily assemble a range of pricing options from carriers including alternative departures for future dates.
Benchmark Market Rates
Compare pricing against market benchmarks to gauge quote competitiveness, monitor market trends, and track buy-side conditions.
Send Customer Quotes
Save, store, and send customer quotes via email and as PDFs to enable communication and to track quote activity to bookings.
Additional Capabilities
Multi-lane Quote Management
Users can create a single quote containing multiple trade lanes and flexibly customize pricing as needed.
Margin & Profit Setting Capabilities
Establish and assign settings to ensure ongoing profitability in a competitive marketplace.
Smart Automations & Workflows
Set preferences to automatically recommend the most competitive carrier option or route.
Expert Support
Our team of experts bring deep freight forwarding and technical domain knowledge to enable more relevant guidance and support that goes beyond basic troubleshooting. The result is a quoting tool backed by people who understand your business and the real-world challenges you face every day.
Why Descartes Spot?
With carriers shifting toward spot pricing and away from traditional named account contracts (NACs), small to mid-size businesses (SMBs) need access to live market rates across multiple carriers within one platform. Descartes Spot centralizes real-time freight pricing, schedules, surcharges, transit times, and market benchmarking data into a single interface, eliminating the need to search multiple carrier websites manually.
By combining live API-driven carrier rates with quotation management, Descartes Spot enables freight forwarders to generate accurate customer quotes in seconds to respond faster to opportunities. This level of speed and market visibility is critical for freight forwarders that need to win business and protect margins.
Our consumption-based pricing lets customers scale usage up or down based on demand, helping to reduce upfront costs and pay only for the value they use.
It's the Descartes Spot Difference!
Scale Faster with a Quoting Platform Designed for Freight Forwarders
- Deliver a dynamic quotation system
- Empower sales teams to deliver accurate spot-rate quotes independently in under 30 seconds - Global rate benchmarking
- Descartes connects with global partners to ensure the latest and most accurate trade lane and forecast data - Data management expertise
- Descartes offers premium, in-house data management support to ensure smooth consumption of rate data within your native systems
