A spot rate is a live price your carrier gives at the moment you search, on your own carrier account, as opposed to a price from a buying agreement you loaded earlier. This article covers running an Instant Quotes search with spot rates in it and reading what the carriers send back. Connecting the carriers is covered in How to connect your carrier accounts for spot rates; the results controls and the option cards in general are covered in How to compare quotation options before sharing.
Before you start
- At least one carrier account is connected on the Spot Rates tab of the Integrations page. See How to connect your carrier accounts for spot rates.
- A supplier related to that carrier's System Carrier exists in your partners. Freightools checks this before it asks the carrier for a rate, and creates the supplier when the connection is saved. See How to relate a supplier to a System Carrier.
- Fill in the search form as for any search — service, customer, origin, destination, equipment and ready date. See How to search Instant Quote manually.
Choose the providers for this search
- Under Spot Rates, each connected carrier is a chip — MSC Spot, Maersk Spot, CMA Spot, Hapag Spot, ONE Spot, COSCO Spot, OOCL Spot, HMM Spot — with a green check button. Its tooltip reads Included in search - click to exclude: click the check on each carrier you do not want to ask on this search. A carrier that is excluded is not called.
- Exclude a carrier that does not serve the corridor you are quoting. Carriers impose daily search limits on an account, and a call to a carrier that cannot serve the lane spends one of them for nothing.
- Click Get Prices.
- While the search runs, the chips read "Searching…", the header reads "Searching carrier APIs and rate databases…" and a dashed panel under it says "Searching for more options…" with "We're checking additional carriers and rate sources.". When the results land, each chip reports how many rates it returned — 1 Rates, or 0 Rates in red when the carrier returned none. A carrier whose connection did not answer reads INTEGRATION ERROR with the carrier's message — "MSC: The carrier login failed or the session has expired. [auth_failed]", "HMM: A network error occurred while contacting the carrier. [network_error, retryable]".
Your buying agreements are searched in the same run. Integrations can request spot rates and buying agreements separately or together, so a search can be spot rates only, agreements only, or both.
Tell a spot result from a buying-agreement result
On the results list, both kinds of option use the same card. Read the label under the carrier name:
- SPOT RATE under the name means the price came live from the carrier on this search.
- No SPOT RATE label means the price came from one of your buying agreements. On either kind, View Full Breakdown expands the card in place — buying beside selling on every charge line, MARGINS & PROFIT, and AGREEMENT REMARKS quoting the remarks on the agreement behind the price — see How to compare quotation options before sharing.
Each spot option carries the carrier's charge breakdown — Freight Charges, Origin Charges, Destination Charges, with View Full Breakdown underneath — the carrier's validity in Valid until, and a price block with the buying figure and the margin from your spot selling rule above the selling total: "$312.99" and "+10.0%" above "$344.29". Connected carriers answer side by side in the same list, so you compare a spot rate with a contract rate on the same lane by reading one card against the other.
Non-standard equipment in a carrier's answer — Open Top, for example — is mapped to the matching Freightools Evaluation Type, so the option is priced in full. Rates that carry special or required activities come back with those activities, including a required logical activity marked as Extended.
Check the validity
Valid until on a spot option is the carrier's own validity for that rate. Read it before you share: a spot price is good until that date. If the customer will take longer to answer, say so in the quotation, or run the search again closer to the booking.
Search door moves with spot rates
Four connected carriers quote door moves with inland haulage included in the spot rate: Maersk, ONE, Hapag-Lloyd and CMA CGM. On a door search, a door address that is not in your address book, or an address matched by its coordinates, is resolved as a door address — the search does not fall back to port-to-port on its own.
When a carrier cannot match the door address you entered, its result says so plainly. It does not return a port-to-port price that looks like a door price. Read the origin and destination on each spot option on a door search before you quote it.
To get the door location exactly right before you search, pick the Google address and then adjust the pin on the map — see How to search Instant Quote manually.
When a provider returns nothing
| You see | What to do |
|---|---|
| A chip reports 0 Rates | The carrier was asked and had no rate for this search. Search again with another ready date or equipment, or quote the lane from a buying agreement. |
| A chip reads INTEGRATION ERROR | The carrier's connection did not answer this search. Read the message on the chip — "[auth_failed]" means the login failed or the session expired; "[network_error, retryable]" means a network error that is worth retrying — then check the carrier's card on Settings → Integrations → Spot Rates with Manage connection — see How to connect your carrier accounts for spot rates. |
| The provider is missing from the results altogether | Check that its chip under Spot Rates was included (green check). Then check that a supplier related to its System Carrier exists — see How to relate a supplier to a System Carrier. |
| The carrier's result says the door address could not be matched | The carrier did not price the door leg. Correct the address or adjust the map pin and search again, or see How to complete a quotation when part of the route has no price. |
| You have run many searches against one carrier today | Carriers impose daily search limits on an account. Exclude that carrier on searches that do not need it. |
| The results list only shows buying agreements | No carrier is included under Spot Rates, or none is connected. See How to connect your carrier accounts for spot rates. |