Understanding the Basics of Rate Card Creation

A Rate Card is the published, partner-specific definition of one slice of your services in Connect — a single shipping method, the lanes or service areas you cover, the fees you charge, and the rates that price your work. 

Once you share a Rate Card with one or more Forwarders and they publish it, those rates are live in each Forwarder's Quote pricing software for that partner's customers.

Note:  Connect treats First Mile, Port-to-Port, and Final Mile as three independent services. Most of the industry collapses these into Import (First Mile + Port-to-Port) and Export (Final Mile, or sometimes the reverse). Our three-part split lets you price each section of the move on its own. For definitions of freight industry terms used throughout this article, see the Glossary of Domain Terms in Exfresso.

The high-level flow:

1. Connect with the Forwarders you want to serve.
2. Create a Rate Card for one combination of shipment portion and shipping product.
3. Set the rates through the entry path appropriate to that combination.
4. Share the card with one or more connected Forwarders, who then publish it on their side.

Connect with a Forwarder first

Sharing a Rate Card requires an established connection to the Forwarder you want to share with. Connections in Connect are Forwarder-initiated by design — as a Rate Agent, you can't search for or invite Forwarders directly from inside Connect. The flow is:

From your Dashboard, use the Share Profile link tool located on the lower-right side of the screen under Shipping Partners (also reachable from the Connect with a Forwarder step in the Getting Started carousel) to copy your Connect profile link.

1. Send that link to the Forwarder — email, text message, or however you reach them.
2. The Forwarder visits their Agents view, finds your business, and initiates the connection request.
3. Once you accept, the partner shows up in your Dashboard's Shipping Partners panel and becomes eligible to receive Rate Card shares.

Connected partners are the only Forwarders who appear in the Rate Card share picker described later.

Create the card

Open My Services in the left navigation, then click Create Rate Card (top-right). A New Rate Card modal opens with two required questions and a name field:

• Which part of the shipment? — Select First Mile, Port-to-Port, or Final Mile. 
• How does it ship? — Select Air, Ocean LCL, or Ocean FCL. 
• Name — A suggested name will appear, but you can replace it with your own. Names must be 3–32 characters and use only letters, digits, hyphens, and spaces.
  
• Fulfilling Rate Agent: Forwarders can create rate cards for a rate agent to complete by selecting the option.  

Each combination of portion and shipping product is one Rate Card.

Note: First Mile and Final Mile services are fully implemented for every shipping product. Port-to-Port currently supports Air only; the Ocean LCL and Ocean FCL Port-to-Port paths are coming in future releases.

Click Create Rate Card to save the card as a draft. The Rate Card Wizard opens to guide you through rate entry.

Set the rates

How rates are entered depends on the combination you picked:

• First Mile and Final Mile Rate Cards (any shipping product) use a guided, multi-step form wizard that walks through service area, fees, and rates. 
• Air Port-to-Port: Rate cards are uploaded using a CSV template. Download the template, complete it in your spreadsheet application, and upload it back to create the rate card. The system will validate the file and highlight any rows that need correction 
• Ocean LCL and Ocean FCL Port-to-Port Rate Cards are not yet supported.

For step-by-step guidance, see the article that matches your combination — every (portion, shipping product) combination has its own How Do I Add ... Services for ... article in the Creating a Rate Card folder. For example: How Do I Add Port-to-Port Services for Air. For background on the typical fee components expected per combination (Handling, Terminal, Customs entry, Delivery, etc.), see What fees should be in a Rate Card?.

Once the rate-entry section is complete, the card moves out of "needs rates" state and is ready to share.

The Rate Card summary view

A Rate Card you've already created opens at its summary page when you click into it from My Services. The summary has four tabs and a left sidebar:

• Rates (default) — the rate data that the card prices against. Click Edit Rate Card Pricing in the sidebar to revise rates.
• Conversation — a message thread with any Forwarder you've shared the card with, where they can ask questions before publishing.
• Shares — the per-card sharing surface (covered below).
• Analytics — usage and performance data once the card is live with partners.

The sidebar shows the card's Sharing status, its lifecycle Status (e.g. Draft), and an Archive this Rate Card action.

Share with Forwarders

Sharing happens on the Rate Card's Shares tab. The empty-state walks through the model:

1. You share. Pick one or more connected Forwarders. The card lands in their incoming Rate Cards queue for review.
2. They review. Each Forwarder can browse the rates and ask questions in the Conversation tab before publishing.
3. They publish. When a Forwarder publishes, your rates go live in their Quote pricing software immediately — for that partner's customers only.

Click Share with Partners to open the share modal. It contains:

• A search picker scoped to your connected Forwarders only. (Forwarders you haven't connected with don't appear; see "Connect with a Forwarder first" above.)
• An optional notes text area for special instructions or context to send with the share.
• A required acknowledgment checkbox.  

Note: Because each Forwarder reviews and publishes on their own timeline, the same card can be live with one partner and still pending with another — and each published copy applies only to that partner's customers.

For the Rate Agent's side of the handoff in detail, see How Do I Publish My Rate Card to a Partner.

What happens next

Once a Forwarder publishes your shared card, the rates are immediately available for that Forwarder's pricing queries — bounded to their own customer base, not anyone else's. To revise rates, edit the card and re-share; until each Forwarder publishes the new version, the previously published version stays in effect for their customers. 

If you need to take live rates out of circulation before a partner re-publishes a revision, you can archive the Rate Card from that Forwarder. For details see How Do I Archive a Rate Card?