Category · Customer portal & experience
Freight customer portal: self-service quotes under your own brand
A freight customer portal is a branded space where a broker’s own customers price a shipment, request a quote, book it and follow it. Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers whose portal shows the sell price only — buy prices and margins live in a private record that customers can never read.
3 guides Updated
Cargavo is a TMS for freight brokers, and the portal is the half of it your customers see. It carries your name and colours, not ours, and it does four things:
- Simulate a price — the customer enters origin, destination, weight, dimensions and options, and gets your sell price from your grids.
- Request a quote with no matching grid — when no tariff covers the lane, the request still goes through and lands in your queue as a Q-YYYY-NNNN quote to price by hand.
- Book and follow — an accepted quote becomes a shipment with an S-YYYY-NNNN reference and a visible history.
- Message in context — questions attach to the quote or the shipment they are about, not to a mailbox.
The commercial argument is not the interface, it is the round-trip it removes. A routine request that used to cost two emails and a wait now costs one form and no wait, which frees your team for the shipments that genuinely need a human — the awkward dimensions, the lane with no tariff, the customer who needs a call. What the customer is allowed to see is a hard boundary, not a display preference:
| Item | Broker sees | Customer sees |
|---|---|---|
| Sell price | Yes | Yes |
| Buy price | Yes | Never |
| Margin | Yes | Never |
| Rate grids | Yes | Never |
| Other customers | Yes | Never |
That separation is enforced on the server, not in the interface: financial data lives in a private sub-record and prices are recalculated server-side on every request, so nothing sensitive is ever sent to a customer session.
Limits. The portal serves one broker’s customers — it is not a marketplace, not a freight exchange and not a place where carriers bid. It runs in 4 languages and is available from 49 €/month, with 7 currencies from the Growth plan with a 14-day trial and no credit card.
In this category
- 01
Online Quote Request Portal for Transport Customers: What to Build
A customer quote portal is a signed-in area under your own brand where your shipper accounts price a shipment themselves, book the price, follow the job to delivery and message you in the quote thread — without ever seeing your buy rate, your margin or your carrier grids. Cargavo, a TMS for freight brokers, ships that portal on every plan from 49 €/month: the customer gets a sell price, a Q-YYYY-NNNN reference and an S-YYYY-NNNN shipment; the buy side stays in a private record their account cannot read.
12 min read Read the guide
- 02
Freight Quote Requests: Email and Phone vs an Online Form
A quote request by email arrives in whatever shape the sender felt like writing; an online form arrives priceable or not at all. That single difference — enforced fields versus free text — is what separates the two channels, not speed. Email keeps real advantages for exceptions, negotiation and first-time shippers. In practice a brokerage runs both, and the form absorbs the repetitive volume.
10 min read Read the guide
- 03
How to Show a Customer a Price Without Revealing Your Buy Rate
You hide a buy rate by never sending it, not by hiding it on screen. The customer-facing price must be computed on a server, from data the customer account is not permitted to read, and delivered as a single number. Cargavo, the TMS for freight brokers and transport commissionaires, stores purchase price and margin in a private subdocument that only broker roles can read, so a customer session has nothing to inspect.
10 min read Read the guide
Questions people ask about this topic
What is a freight customer portal?
It is a branded self-service space where a broker’s customers simulate a price, request a quote, book a shipment, see their history and exchange messages. It replaces the email round-trip for routine requests while keeping every price computed from the broker’s own rate grids.
Can my customers see my buy price or my margin?
No. In Cargavo the buy price, the margin and the rate grids live in a private record that customer sessions cannot read, and prices are recalculated server-side. A customer sees the sell price for their own shipments and nothing about other customers of the same brokerage.
What happens when a customer asks for a lane I have no rate for?
The request goes through anyway. Cargavo supports gridless quote requests: origin, destination, weight, dimensions and options are captured and the request appears in the broker queue as a Q-YYYY-NNNN quote to be priced manually. No lane is lost because a tariff is missing.
Can the portal carry my own branding?
Yes, on the Scale plan. The customer portal is then white-label: your brokerage’s name and visual identity, in the customer’s language among 4 and in the currency the quote is denominated in among 7. Your customers deal with you, not with a third-party tool.
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