LTL Freight Quotes for WooCommerce
Is it possible to get accurate LTL freight quotes on your WooCommerce store? You bet it is! Historically you couldn’t find good WooCommerce freight plugins. Sure, you might have found some simple freight calculators capable of providing “ballpark estimates”. But nothing that took the risk out of selling products online that must ship LTL freight. That changed when Eniture Technology introduced its family of LTL Freight Quotes plugins for WooCommerce.
Eniture Technology has WordPress plugins for a number of LTL freight carriers and third party logistics providers. The plugins give WooCommerce merchants the ability to accurately offer LTL freight as a shipping method. If you’re an online merchant that sells products too large for the postal and parcel carriers, now you can have confidence offering LTL freight as a shipping option 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Your negotiated LTL freight rates, real-time, all day, every day.
Why Are Real-Time LTL Freight Quotes Important?
LTL freight quotes can range from less than $100 to well over $1,000. This makes padding your sale price in order to offer free shipping unrealistic. And the sheer number of data points required to create and maintain an effective table-driven solution is unmanageable. While some e-commerce merchants succeed with these strategies for postal services, they don’t work for LTL freight. If you’re relying on either of these methods for LTL freight, you’re either receiving very few orders or are losing lots of money on shipping.
Since other strategies led to such undesirable results, it became commonplace for online merchants to ask their customers to call for a freight quote. While you might protect the bottom line with this approach (by making sure the quoted shipping charges are accurate), it undermines key tenets of e-commerce.
If you’re operating an online store, you want your customers to be able to place an order 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The shopping experience should be convenient, and as frictionless as possible. Requiring your customers to call you to complete their order is in direct conflict with these goals. You worked hard putting your business online in order to create a 24/7 cash machine. Why sabotage it with the need for a phone call?
The LTL Freight Quotes plugin solves these challenges. Your customers will see accurate quotes that come directly from your LTL freight carrier. They’ll be able to place orders anytime they want, without waiting for you to provide a freight quote.
How Does The LTL Freight Quotes Plugin Work?
When your shopper requests a shipping rate estimate on the cart page or enters an address on the checkout page, the plugin determines if it should provide LTL freight quotes. You control when this will occur with the plugin’s settings.
If the shipping options should include LTL freight quotes, the plugin will send the LTL carrier the data it needs to calculate the quotes. The plugin may ask the carrier to provide multiple quotes so different services can be offered. For example, the plugin may ask the carrier to provide one quote for standard LTL freight service, and a second one that includes lift gate delivery service. The settings you choose when you setup the plugin will determine the options that your shoppers will see.
The carrier will reply to the plugin with freight quotes that reflect your discount. At this juncture, the quotes the plugin has will be identical to what the carrier’s website would have provided had you used it to get the quotes instead.
Before the plugin displays the quotes to your shopper, it will apply any other settings you have enabled. For example, the plugin will add a markup or handling fee to the LTL freight quotes if you enabled that feature in the settings.
Within seconds your customer will see options for LTL freight.
When the customer completes the order with LTL freight chosen as the shipping method, you can feel confident that you’ve collected the right amount of money to cover the shipping cost.
Which LTL Carriers Can Give Me Real-Time Quotes?
Eniture Technology offers the LTL Freight Quotes plugin for 11 LTL carriers and 5 3PLs (Third Party Logistics providers). Browse our library of WooCommerce plugins or click the logo for your carrier of choice (right hand margin for desktop devices, below this article for mobile devices). You’ll be delivered to a landing page specific to that carrier where you can learn more about the plugin features, glance at the User’s Guide, and even download the plugin installation file to start a free trial.
