Slightly over a year ago, Sendy introduced a new offering, the Sendy Freight Unit to move even larger consignments. Today, almost a year in the making, we’ve taken freight container transportation online! This means that our customers can easily and conveniently place container orders on the Sendy platform.
Sendy Freight gives you easy access to easy multiple transporters with a wide range of routes. These span across all of Eastern Africa, as well as parts of Central Africa, and cuts across multiple industries; FMCG, Containerized Goods, Fertilizers, and Grains).
We kicked off our efforts to enable online freight orders by speaking to multiple clients who deal with containerized goods. This allowed us to understand the different processes, needs, and challenges within the containerized-goods movement industry, and leverage this in developing an offering that provides value to users.
Containers are special. Each has a different container number, size, and weight. Each is delivered and unloaded at different places and empty containers have to be returned to a specific point. Containerized cargo is mostly picked up at a port. Therefore every container has to go through a number of processes before it is cleared and transported.
Most of our freight customers need visibility on all these steps and the locations of each container.
A single shipment generally has many containers. You can imagine how annoying it could be placing individual truck orders for 26 or even 83 of them.
Now, you can place bulk container orders by simply specifying how many containers they have and getting trailers assigned to each automatically. You can also upload a spreadsheet with all the order details and get vehicles allocated to each unique container. Afterwards, track containers individually as they get cleared and delivered. Convenient, right?
1.Getting started with Sendy Freight
Go to the Sendy app and select click on your menu. You’ll see the freight option, click on that. NB: The freight offering is available on both the web and android platform.
2. Placing your first order
Enter the pick-up and destination details and the number of containers you’d like to move. If all empty containers within a single order are to be returned to the same destination, select the checkbox. If not, you will have the option to add different empty container destinations.
3. Enter Container Details
After entering the primary details of your order, you will enter individual container details i.e. the container number, gross container weight, empty container destination, container size, and the consignee. NB: This process will be repeated for all containers you’d like to move.
That’s it! You’re now ready to place your order. Hit Place Order and start tracking your orders!
4. Track your order
All your orders will appear on your right panel, and you can track an individual order by clicking into it. Here you’ll see a timeline of the order events. The process is similar on Android, just head to your orders and track individual container orders. Easy peasy! :)
Place your first container order here and let us know what you think!