Established in India in 2019, the global freight marketplace FreightMango has attracted customers worldwide who struggle to find guaranteed capacity from well-vetted forwarders to support their growing international shipments.
“FreightMango acts a bit like Airbnb,” said Charley Dehoney, the CEO of FreightMango Americas, its recently launched North American office based in Elkhorn, Nebraska.
“If you show up in town and can’t get in touch with that homeowner, there are mitigation services available to keep things on track. We do the same thing for ocean freight. We provide access to guaranteed capacity for ocean freight shipping, full container and LCL, through a platform where shippers can go and find the excess capacity that everybody is looking for right now.”
Dehoney explained to FreightWaves that not only does it provide capacity, it provides the additional technology stack needed to allow them to track capacity, manage documentation and pay for their services, like cargo insurance and trade financing, all on one platform.
“I think where we really differentiate ourselves is with this bundled solution,” said Dehoney. “Because we are so well integrated into all of these services, it allows people to bundle all of that into one workflow. Much like Expedia, you get an air ticket but you can also get a rental car, hotel trip and insurance with one contact in case something goes wrong. This communication layer is so critical to global logistics and we have an operations team in the U.S. and India that are constantly building and working to make sure that shippers are having a great experience.”
Visibility that works for you
To provide high-level customer service, FreightMango realized it would need to find a partner to supply proper shipment visibility.
When it comes to visibility, Dehoney said, these proactive updates are what is truly important to global logistics.
“Customers don’t want visibility to watch their shipments all day, they want to know how quickly you can tell me when the expected transit is going to change,” he said.
While looking for visibility partners, FreightMango Product Head Rachit Arora vetted numerous ocean visibility providers looking to build a solution that was less about knowing where your shipment is and more about being able to create tools that would engage the marketplace’s customer base.
“Visibility can increase the engagement of your customers [on your marketplace],” Arora said. “Imagine you are doing 100 bookings a day and you have a small operations team. Our technology is pinging the global shippers to get updates to let you know your part is coming, increasing your operational efficiency.”
To create a technology stack that could continuously be proactive for customers, Arora ended up building a strong relationship with ocean carrier tracking API provider Vizion.
“They had a data-centric API approach,” he explained. “There was a lot of flexibility in their API that allowed us to do what we wanted to do with it, compared to others that had a lot of pre-built tools.”
“Rachit needed the flexibility,” said Dehoney. “We didn’t need a whole toolbox of execution tools, we just needed them to deliver the data where and when we needed it in our workflow.”
Kyle Cunningham, marketing director for Vizion, explained that making global freight data easy to access was the exact vision of the company.
“We are strictly an API-driven company,” he said. “Our foundation is around the standardization of data and how easy it is to access that data so platforms like FreightMango can expand their services and offerings based on their customer needs. This way they don’t have to worry about where and how they are receiving data and can worry about their business’s priorities.”
“This type of model is perfect for us,” said Dehoney. “We are not a freight forwarder, we sit in between them and we are neutral so we have some unique cases around who needs what information and when they need it delivered. There is not a rigid set of milestones that we need to adhere to.”
Dehoney said this partnership would become even more important as the company grows its services and takes on customers with different structural needs.
“For us, it’s [Vizion’s] brand promise. It’s not just about the data, it’s the flexibility to do whatever we need them to do in the long run,” he said.
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