Documentation

Customer self-booking

Let customers book directly on published rate cards without email back-and-forth.

2 min readLast updated 13 Apr 2026

Self-booking turns your published rate cards into a store-front. Customers pick a lane, enter cargo, see a price, and book — no quote email loop.

Prerequisites

  • Customer has a published rate card covering the desired lanes.
  • Customer has a portal contact with the Booker role.
  • Customer is within credit limit (see credit control).

Flow

  1. Customer picks mode (air / sea / road).
  2. Enters origin, destination, cargo (weight, volume, pieces), incoterm, requested dates.
  3. Platform resolves the rate card → shows price, transit time, schedule options.
  4. Customer picks a schedule / service level.
  5. Enters additional info (shipper / consignee details, special instructions).
  6. Confirms → booking created.
  7. Booking confirmation PDF emailed automatically.

Guardrails

  • Out-of-scope lanes — if no rate card covers the lane, system falls back to "request a quote" → creates a manual quote task on sales.
  • Over credit — system notifies ops to approve manually, rather than blocking silently.
  • Restricted commodities — hazmat, oversized, temperature-controlled → may require ops review before confirmation.

Pricing transparency

The price shown is the actual price — no surprises on the invoice later. Surcharges (fuel, BAF, etc.) computed at booking time using current indices.

Schedules

Schedule picker shows available sailings / flights / truck departures for the lane. Data comes from carrier schedule feeds; fallback to published rate-card schedule if feeds aren't available.

Templates

Repeat shippers save booking templates (preset cargo + addresses) — next booking is 2 clicks.

After booking

  • Booking enters the same ops workflow as any other.
  • Customer sees tracking, documents, invoice in the portal as always.
  • Ops treats it like a manually-created booking.

Analytics

Per-customer self-booking adoption metric on the account page:

  • % of bookings via portal vs email.
  • Customers with high portal adoption typically have better retention and lower cost-to-serve.

Commercial impact

Self-booking drops booking cost-to-serve by 30–50%. Sales / account managers shift time from transactional to strategic.

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