uShip sees growth in larger-than-parcel (LTP) market

Logistics tech vendor uShip is adding to its tools for freight automation software and load bidding. The Austin, Texas-based online shipping marketplace and software vendor serves a range of consumers, enterprise businesses, and less-than-truckload (LTL) shipping customers.

One of the fastest growing sectors for adopting logistics software is the $26 billion larger-than-parcel (LTP) consumer shipping segment, including odd items such as vehicles, furniture, households, boats, motorcycles, airplanes, and pets, the company said.

Due to those items' unwieldy and unstackable nature, traditional carriers often ignore the segment. uShip's software fills that gap by allowing entrepreneurial providers—from single-truck owner-operators to mid-size fleets—to bid on those tricky jobs.

That "sharing economy" approach allows freight carriers to price-search, book, and ship nearly anything they want to move. Since its founding in 2003, the uShip marketplace has facilitated more than one million deliveries with service providers, earning nearly $1 billion and driving one billion miles in the process, the company said.

The company also provides an enterprise platform, serving customers such as logistics provider DB Schenker, which uses the uShip PRO platform to achieve pricing and performance transparency, real-time bid/offer pricing, mobile tracking technology, and supplemental capacity through an online provider network, uShip said.

"The $2.2 trillion freight world may be sliced and diced in infinite ways, but there's a common thread of sentiment throughout: the need for faster, easier, and cheaper transport, which have been core to uShip from the beginning," uShip founder and CEO Matt Chasen said in a release. "Platform economics and the 'Uberization' of everything—including trucking—have added fuel to this movement. ... It's exciting to be at the epicenter of this seismic shift as old-school shipping methods like phone calls, faxes, spreadsheets, and whiteboards become a thing of the past."