The Customer Portal is the website your customers sign in to for everything commercial and
operational they have with you. It is branded for your company, not for Freightools, so your
customer sees your identity throughout. This article describes the customer's side: what they see
once they are signed in and what they can do there. Setting the portal up — enabling it for a
customer, inviting their contacts, the quoting rules and the branding — is covered in the two
setup articles linked at the end.
Before you start
- The portal has to be switched on for your company — Customer Portal Enabled in
Advanced Company Settings, which only Freightools platform administrators can toggle — and
enabled on the customer's record, with ENABLE CUSTOMER PORTAL under Sales Details on
the General tab of Edit Customer, and the customer's contacts invited. See
How to manage the Customer Portal in Freightools. - What the portal shows of your branding and of carrier rates, and how long a portal quote stays
valid, are company settings. See
How to configure Customer Portal rules, branding and service mixes.
The portal is yours, not Freightools'
The portal is built on the Freightools 3.0 experience and white-labelled for the freight forwarder:
your customer is handed one branded interface for quotation, shipment visibility and ongoing
interaction with you. Whether the Freightools logo appears at all is your choice — the
Hide Freightools Logo setting is described in the configuration article above.
The Home dashboard
When a customer signs in they land on a Home dashboard that shows their active shipments on an
interactive map. From there they can:
- search for a shipment;
- filter shipments by status — Booked, Picked Up, Departed, Arrived, Delivered;
- see at once which shipments need attention, because those are highlighted.
This is the screen a customer looks at when they ask you "where is my container": the shipment and
its status are on their map before they write to you.
What a customer can open in the portal
The portal brings the commercial and the operational side together in one place:
| Area | What the customer finds there |
|---|---|
| Sales Proposals | The quotations you have issued to them. |
| Bookings | Their bookings with you. |
| Track & Trace | Where their shipments are. |
| Invoices | The invoices you have issued to them. |
| Request a Quote | A Request a Quote button, so they can ask you for a price from inside the portal. |
Request a Quote
The Request a Quote button is part of the Customer Portal: a customer who wants a price for a
new shipment asks for it from inside the portal instead of writing to you. Who may submit a request,
and whether a customer class is restricted from doing so, are the Public RFQ settings in the
configuration article.
A customer says the Request a Quote button is missing
The button is part of the portal. If a customer cannot find it, ask them which page of the portal
they are on and tell your Freightools contact, with the customer's name and the page.
Portal users on your side
Portal users are your customer's people, not your own team, and they carry portal roles —
Partner Contact and Partner Contact Admin — that decide whether they can manage other
users at their company. The roles and how contacts are invited are in
How to manage the Customer Portal in Freightools.
In your own Freightools, the users grid carries a Customer Portal User column and a
Supplier Portal User column, so you can tell which users are portal users of a customer or a
supplier and which are your own staff.
The portal is not the quotation page
A customer receives two different kinds of page from you, and it helps to keep them apart when a
customer asks about "the link":
| The Customer Portal | The quotation page | |
|---|---|---|
| How the customer gets there | Signs in with a portal account. | Opens the link in the quotation email — no account is required. |
| What it covers | Their sales proposals, bookings, tracking, invoices and quote requests, over time. | One quotation: its price, validity, terms and the Accept Quote / Reject Quote buttons. |
| Read more | This article. | How customers accept a Freightools quotation |
A customer who has never been invited to the portal can still receive and answer quotations by
email; the quotation page does not need a portal account.