Bid event

A bid event is freight procurement in its formal form. The shipper distributes a bid file, usually a spreadsheet or a procurement portal, listing each lane with origin, destination, equipment, forecast loads, and any requirements such as CTPAT, cross-border coverage, or tracking. Bidders return a rate per lane and often a capacity commitment. The shipper scores the responses, may run one or more rounds of feedback, and issues the award, which becomes the routing guide. Annual RFPs cover a year; a mini-bid covers a slice of lanes for weeks or a few months.

Cross-border bid files carry extra fields that domestic ones do not: crossing point, whether the rate is door-to-door or split by leg, currency for the Mexican leg, and who provides the transfer at the border.

What this means when you move freight

Price every lane in the file off what it pays now. Brokers who bid from real carrier bids on each lane and direction are more likely to win lanes they can keep, while brokers who bid from a spreadsheet average win lanes they later reject. Ask for the missing cross-border fields before bidding, because a rate that includes the crossing on one lane and not on another is not comparable. Shippers should publish the validity period and the fuel and currency rules in the bid file, and check each awarded rate against the lane's market rate before signing; an award set well under market is a tender acceptance problem scheduled for next quarter.