Ltl Shipping Vs. Ftl Shipping

There are two major types of shipping services that are offered by trucking companies. Most Houston messenger delivery services that run a full scale trucking operation are going to actually offer both of these services. These are called LTL and FTL services. You will usually see the services notated in the preceding way, but the acronyms stand for less than truck load and full truck load shipping.

Less than truck load means that the cargo from a single company is not going to be enough to fill up an entire truck. So, the courier company finds other companies that need to ship products in a similar direction to the first client. They combine orders that are the right size until they can fill a truck completely up, to make it as efficient as possible, no matter how many orders from different companies they have to combine to do so.

FTL shipping instead means that a customer is going to be the only client shipping in a given vehicle. This might mean that the customer has enough cargo to fill an entire truck. It might also mean that for whatever reason they do not want to share a truck with other companies or clients. Therefore, they pay to rent the whole truck even if they do not fill it completely to capacity.

Both shipping methods have their advantages. The primary advantage to shipping LTL is that it is almost always going to save you money. There are always other clients on board the truck and some of the costs that are associated with a shipment are shared between all of the clients. The other good thing about LTL shipping is that it provides a practical way for moving goods that fall into a weight class between the other major methods of shipping. Packages much over 100 lbs cannot be moved by a regular courier company. By the same token, most people don't want to pay for FTL shipping unless they are shipping more than 10,000 lbs. LTL gives the people shipping cargo that fall in between those two extremes with a viable shipping method.

LTL shipping only has one downside. Because there are so many clients to juggle, some of them are inevitably going to be the last ones on a truck who have their packages delivered. If you happen to be one of those last clients, you will find that your delivery takes longer than it would with FTL shipping.