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Blog · Wallet share and penetration · Shipping and logistics

Trade lane share per customer for freight forwarders and shipping lines

How a forwarder or carrier measures share per customer and trade lane from the booking system: TEU or chargeable weight won against the customer's total on the lane, office coverage against quotes logged, and the reconciliation to invoiced volume.

By CoviragePublished 16 September 20263 min read
The short answerTrade lane share is the TEU or chargeable weight you carried for a customer on a lane divided by the customer's total on that lane, from the booking system joined to tender or customs volumes where you hold them. Compute it per customer and lane, roll it up per sales office with quotes logged against accounts assigned, and assert that bookings by office sum to invoiced TEU and tonnage before the commercial review.

A forwarder is usually the incumbent on one trade lane for a customer and has never asked where the other four go. The booking system holds every shipment the forwarder moved; the tender the forwarder bid on holds what the customer moves in total. This guide sets out how to compute lane share per customer from those two, roll it up by office, and reconcile it to invoiced volume.

The measures

Per customer and lane:

Lane share = volume carried ÷ customer's total volume on the lane

Per customer:

Lanes carried ÷ lanes the customer runs

Per sales office:

Coverage = accounts with a quote or booking in the window ÷ accounts assigned

Units by mode: TEU for ocean, chargeable weight for air, and never mixed.

The rows you need

  • Bookings: one row per shipment with customer, origin, destination, mode, volume, revenue, date and office.
  • Quotes: one row per quote with customer, lane, date and outcome.
  • Customer volumes: from tenders bid, customs data, or the norm from your own book, per customer and lane, with the source.
  • Coverage list: which office and salesperson owns which customer.

Customer identifiers only.

Building the lane view

  1. Normalise lanes to port pairs for ocean and airport pairs for air, grouped to the trade lane the commercial team uses: Asia to North Europe, transpacific eastbound, and so on.
  2. Carried per customer and lane from bookings, in the mode's unit.
  3. Total per customer and lane from tenders, customs data or the norm, labelled.
  4. Share, and the gap in units and at the forwarder's margin per unit on the lane.

The roll-up

  1. Customer by lane by mode: carried, total, share, gap value.
  2. Customer: lanes carried against lanes run.
  3. Office: accounts, quotes logged, coverage, gap total. Assert that bookings by customer sum to the office's volume.
  4. Region and company: assert that offices sum to the region and to invoiced TEU and tonnage, per mode.

invoiced TEU = Σ regions = Σ offices = Σ customers = Σ ocean lanes

and the same for chargeable weight.

A worked example

One customer, ocean, four trade lanes, last quarter.

Trade lane Shipped by customer Carried by us Share Source Gap at margin
Asia to North Europe 1,460 TEU 1,240 TEU 85% Tender $28k
Transpacific eastbound 1,370 TEU 410 TEU 30% Tender $121k
Transatlantic westbound 900 TEU 90 TEU 10% Customs $102k
Intra-Asia 620 TEU 0 0% Norm $44k

Incumbent on one lane, a fifth of a large lane, a tenth of another, absent from a fourth. The commercial director's conversation with this customer is about the transpacific, because it is the largest gap and the tender said so. That conversation is on the page before anyone opens the booking system.

Where it goes wrong

Lanes at port level. A customer shipping through three Chinese ports to two North European ports looks like six small lanes. Group to the trade lane the commercial team uses.

Modes mixed. TEU and kilograms summed together produce a number that means nothing. Keep modes apart and reconcile each.

Customer entities split. A shipper's subsidiaries booking under separate accounts appear as separate small customers. Roll up to the entity the tender came from.

Spot and contract together. Contract lanes are yours by agreement; a low share on one is a contract problem. Keep the flag and read the two lists separately.

Every quarter, per office

Mapped once, the booking export and the tender data produce the lane view per customer and coverage per office every quarter, reconciled to invoiced volume. Covirage builds this from the export as it is. The shipping and logistics page describes the setup, and you can upload a sample booking export and see the roll-up on your own rows.

Questions people ask

How do we know a customer's total volume on a lane?

From the customer's tender where you bid, from customs or port data where it is available, or from the norm for customers of that size and commodity in your own book. Label the source. A tender figure is a fact; a norm is a prospect.

Ocean and air in the same roll-up?

Yes, with the unit kept apart: TEU for ocean, chargeable weight for air. Lanes are port pairs or airport pairs. Never sum across modes; reconcile each to its own invoiced volume.

Which systems export this?

CargoWise, Magaya and most forwarding systems export bookings by customer, origin, destination, mode, volume and office. That export is the input.

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