Gateway Optimum Transportation

Trade shows can be a boon to your business by allowing you to introduce yourself and your products to new clients. It is also a great venue to help you gauge the interest in your product and or service and help you network with the important people in your industry. This is the important part of the show, but for those with a lot of experience in trade shows, the real work begins well before the show begins and continues well after the last attendee has left the building. My blog this month focuses on the work of the trade show, the behind the scenes logistics that takes place before and after the event to ensure the trade show is successful, which for most means has a positive return on investment, let us start this with:   Attending a trade show as an exhibitor can be expensive. There are many costs involved with exhibiting at a trade show consisting of costs like how big your booth is, how much seating, furniture and tables you want to provide for your visitors, use o

A White Glove Delivery of a glass table into a home in Paradise Valley, AZ. The table top needed to be assembled Glass attached by decorative screws to the Base and placed in the home. With the continued growth of online sales, the supply chain and the understanding of how it works has literally gotten closer to home. We get tasked to manage the logistics of residential home deliveries on a daily basis, whether it is the items professionally packaged at Gateway Crate and Freight or items Freight Forwarded through Gateway Optimum Transportation. A lot of our job is explaining to customers, shippers and consignees, what the supply chain and distribution terminology actually means to them. First transport, last mile, threshold, inside, residential, lift gate, terminal pickup, white glove, product placement, assembly, installation and debrit removal are all terms that we now have to explain to customers who have had, until the advent of online retail, no past experiences with th

Gateway Optimum Transportation manages a number of logistics services for our clients including the ever increasingly important White Glove Delivery. In today's ultra competitive online retail environment it has become important for companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors. One way they do this is by offering their client a service at their home or business, where their delivered product may be unpacked, setup, in some cases assembled, and the packaging taken away. This is called a "White Glove Delivery". So what is the service called when a company shows up at your house with a brand new furniture set you purchased and brings the couch into the living room and takes the bed into the bedroom and leaves the mattresses and the couch in the plastic and the head board, foot board and rails in their boxes and leaves? This is considered an "Inside Delivery" The Inside Delivery service is when the delivery company brings the items

< = > Less is More As more and more people and things fill our living space, the more and more valuable the space becomes. No place is this more evident than in logistics, where the major players in parcel and freight distribution instituted a pay for space pricing metric called dimensional weight shipping. Traditionally all parcel and freight moving ground in the U.S was charged by weight only,  so a small box measuring 10X10X10 that weighed 20 lbs cost the same to ship as a box that also weighed 20 lbs but measured 20X20X20 which is twice as big, but not anymore. Shipping a 20 lb box measuring 20X20X20 today means you are going to pay for shipping 49 lbs not 20. Why? Because now you pay for shipping the dimensions of your box not the weight of your box, actually now you will pay the higher rate of the two, actual weight vs. dimensional weight, whichever is more.     I have covered dimensional pricing before in this blog and talked about the factor. Both FedEx

When someone contacts Gateway Crate and Freight to receive a quote to pack and ship an item, they normally are looking for a very easy answer, like that will be about $500 to pack and ship that. However, getting to the Optimum price for the packing and shipping that they really need is not that easy. We have had a number of people call us and ask "I need to have a crate built to ship my couch to Wisconsin, how much is that going to cost?" and of course they are just looking for a ballpark answer but for us to even be in the same ballpark many questions need to be answered. We ask the customer "are you sure that needs to be crated?" There are a number of options to ship this couch that all have to do with the value and the amount of RISK you are likely willing to take. If the answer to the question is..."The couch is a one of a kind leather chesterfield crafted in the 1700s and is valued at over $20,000"...then full protection of a solid wood shippi