Ask five freight forwarders about their biggest challenge and you may receive nine answers, two revised ETAs and one request to “please check with destination.”
That is the nature of the industry. Freight forwarding sits between carriers, customs authorities, overseas agents, shippers, consignees, terminals and transport providers. When one part changes, the forwarder is usually expected to know about it, explain it and somehow prevent it from affecting the delivery date.
A global Vanguard Logistics survey collected views from more than 500 forwarders, customers and non-customers about LCL shipping, digitization and changing customer needs. Its central conclusion was revealing: the industry expected more digital ways of working, but customer service and trusted relationships would remain at the center of success.
That tension still defines the biggest freight forwarding challenges today. Forwarders need better technology, but they also need reliable people at origin and destination who can provide accurate costs, respond quickly and take responsibility when a shipment changes.
This is where an active network such as ONE Globe Alliance can play a practical role. Members can post live cargo enquiries, receive and compare quotations, nominate overseas partners and keep enquiry-level communication moving across operations, pricing and sales teams. It does not make disruption disappear. Sadly, the “remove all port congestion” button remains delayed at customs. It does help forwarders coordinate the parts they can control.
So, what do 500-plus industry voices, supported by newer research, tell us about the problems forwarders are trying to solve?
A Quick Note About the Data
This article does not claim that ONE Globe Alliance conducted a survey of 500 members.
The starting point is Vanguard Logistics’ 2021 global survey, which collected responses from more than 500 customers and non-customers, primarily freight forwarders, about LCL shipping. Because that research was LCL-focused, its broad themes have been checked against newer evidence, including:
- Adelante SCM and Magaya’s 2025 freight-forwarding digitization study
- FIATA’s 2026 priorities and industry discussions
- Current operational and financial reporting from the forwarding sector
The result is a practical synthesis, not a fictional ranking with suspiciously tidy percentages.
The Seven Biggest Freight Forwarding Challenges
| Challenge | What it affects most | What forwarders need |
|---|---|---|
| Rate and capacity volatility | Quote validity and margin | Live rates, alternatives and clear assumptions |
| Fragmented digital processes | Productivity and data quality | Connected workflows and less re-entry |
| Customer visibility expectations | Retention and service workload | Reliable milestones and exception alerts |
| Margin and cash-flow pressure | Profitability and growth | Complete costing, credit control and faster billing |
| Reliable overseas partners | Service quality and local execution | Verification, references and active communication |
| Compliance and data demands | Clearance, penalties and delays | Accurate data, ownership and current procedures |
| Talent and knowledge retention | Operational consistency | SOPs, training and automation of repetitive work |
These challenges overlap. A weak overseas handoff creates bad data, poor visibility, more exceptions and lower margins. By the end, one missing destination charge has invited the whole family.
1. Rate and Capacity Volatility
Forwarders sell transportation without controlling most of the assets that provide it. Ocean rates move with disruption, capacity and demand. Airfreight changes with fuel, peak seasons and available capacity. Road costs respond to drivers, borders and regional conditions.
The problem is not merely that rates change. It is that they may change between the quotation and the booking.
A forwarder can quote a shipment on Monday, receive customer approval on Thursday and discover on Friday that the space, rate or routing has changed. Congratulations, the quote has aged seven years in four days.
What forwarders can do
- Display clear rate-validity dates.
- Separate base freight from variable surcharges.
- Confirm whether space is guaranteed or subject to availability.
- Maintain backup carriers, gateways and routings.
- Compare more than one overseas quotation where time permits.
- Price operational complexity rather than competing on headline freight alone.
Fast access to reliable partners matters here. ONE Globe Alliance allows members to circulate an enquiry and compare received quotations, which can make alternative routing and local-cost checks easier when the first option stops working.
2. Too Many Manual and Disconnected Processes
The forwarding industry has plenty of technology. The challenge is that much of it does not communicate. Rates arrive in spreadsheets, instructions live in email, milestones sit in carrier portals and staff repeatedly copy the same data.
The 2025 Adelante SCM and Magaya study found that only 23% of surveyed forwarders had digitized more than 75% of their business processes. Fewer than 40% were using a freight-forwarding management system. Meanwhile, improving productivity and efficiency was the leading motivation for digitization.
That gap matters because repetitive data entry is not simply annoying. It creates quoting delays, inconsistent shipment records and avoidable mistakes.
What forwarders can do
Start with one process that affects customers or margins directly:
- Standardize enquiry intake.
- Centralize carrier and agent quotations.
- Automate document-data extraction.
- Connect shipment milestones to customer notifications.
- Generate invoices promptly after agreed milestones.
- Track exceptions in one accountable workflow.
Digitization should remove duplicate work, not add a shiny dashboard that employees must update manually after updating the original spreadsheet. That is not automation. That is administrative cosplay.
For a broader explanation, see What Is a Digital Freight Network and How Does It Work?.
3. Customers Want Visibility, Speed and Human Answers
Technology expectations have changed. In the Magaya study, 90% of shippers said technological capabilities were extremely or very important when evaluating forwarders and 3PLs. Real-time tracking, integration capabilities and automated documentation and compliance were among the most requested features.
Yet technology alone is not the answer. Vanguard’s 500-plus-response study concluded that digital investment would grow while customer service and relationships remained central.
Customers do not merely want more tracking events. They want to know:
- Is the shipment progressing normally?
- Has the ETA changed?
- What does the change mean for delivery?
- Who is handling the problem?
- When will the next confirmed update arrive?
A portal showing an old ETA is not visibility. It is a confident-looking historical document.
What forwarders can do
Define a standard set of customer-facing milestones. Label estimated and confirmed events clearly. Assign an owner to every important exception. Notify customers when action is required, not every time a system receives a harmless status code.
Before launching customer self-service, use the readiness framework in Freight Tracking Software: What Forwarders Need Before Offering Customer Self-Service Updates.
4. Protecting Margin While Funding the Shipment
Forwarders often operate between shorter supplier-payment terms and longer customer-payment terms. The carrier, terminal or overseas agent expects payment, while the customer may pay weeks later.
At the same time, a quote can lose margin through:
- Missing origin or destination charges
- Expired buying rates
- Incorrect weight or dimensions
- Demurrage, detention and storage
- Customs examinations
- Currency movements
- Unrecovered delivery waiting time
- Claims and bad debt
The recent public-company data reviewed in our Freight Forwarding Industry Margins guide shows why turnover can be misleading. Large forwarders may retain roughly one-quarter to one-third of revenue as gross profit or its closest accounting equivalent, with much less remaining after staff and operating costs.
What forwarders can do
Track gross profit by shipment, customer, lane, salesperson and overseas partner. Compare the estimated margin at quotation with the final result after job closure. Monitor overdue receivables and set credit limits before exposure becomes uncomfortable.
Most importantly, quote the complete movement. A low ocean rate does not rescue a quotation that forgot destination handling. It merely gives the surprise fee a nicer opening act.
The LCL Freight Quote Checklist covers the charges and assumptions that should be confirmed before sending an LCL offer.
5. Finding Reliable Overseas Freight Forwarding Agents
Freight forwarding is global, but execution is local.
A forwarder may control the customer relationship at one end while depending on an overseas agent for pickup, customs coordination, handling, delivery, documents and local updates at the other. The partner’s performance becomes part of the forwarder’s service, whether or not the customer knows the partner exists.
The challenge is not finding a company name. It is deciding which company is credible, responsive and suitable for the shipment.
What forwarders should verify
- Company registration and operating history
- Relevant licences and certifications
- Physical address and company-domain email
- Independent trade references
- Service experience on the required lane or commodity
- Credit terms and payment instructions
- Escalation contacts
- Bank-detail changes through a second verified channel
An impressive website proves that the company has an impressive website. It does not prove that somebody will answer when customs asks a difficult question at 8:00 a.m.
ONE Globe Alliance combines member review with a working platform for enquiries and quotations. Its verification process uses internal due diligence, overseas trade-reference checks and third-party business-verification sources. Verification reduces uncertainty, but no network can eliminate commercial risk. Forwarders should continue using shipment-level checks, written terms and appropriate credit controls.
Read the complete process in How to Find Reliable Overseas Freight Forwarding Agents.
6. Compliance and Data Requirements Keep Expanding
The modern forwarder is not only arranging transport. Teams are handling increasingly detailed security filings, customs data, sanctions checks, dangerous-goods rules, emissions information and electronic documentation.
FIATA’s 2026 discussions identify digitalization, trade documentation, sustainability, safety, security, education and trade facilitation as priority areas. The common thread is data quality.
If shipment information is incomplete, copied incorrectly or received too late, the consequences can include customs holds, rejected filings, penalties and missed departures.
What forwarders can do
- Maintain lane-specific compliance checklists.
- Define who owns each filing and deadline.
- Validate data before transmission.
- Record the source of customer-provided information.
- Keep sanctions and restricted-party checks current.
- Use controlled document versions.
- Train staff whenever a regulation or filing process changes.
The goal is not to turn every operations executive into an international trade lawyer. It is to make sure “I thought the agent was filing it” never becomes the official root-cause analysis.
7. Talent, Training and Knowledge Retention
Experienced forwarding staff carry enormous amounts of practical knowledge. They know which routing is realistic, which carrier response needs to be challenged, which destination charge looks unusual and who to call when a shipment develops personality.
The problem is that much of this knowledge lives in people’s inboxes and memories. When an experienced employee leaves, the company may lose a working map of its own operations.
New employees also face a steep learning curve across transport modes, documentation, customs, rates and customer communication.
What forwarders can do
- Document recurring decisions, not only basic tasks.
- Create quotation and shipment checklists.
- Record approved suppliers and escalation paths by lane.
- Review operational mistakes without turning the meeting into a courtroom drama.
- Rotate junior staff across pricing, operations and customer service.
- Automate repetitive copying so staff can focus on exceptions and judgment.
Technology should preserve and support expertise, not attempt to replace it with a chatbot that has never argued about free time at destination.
What the 500+ Responses Ultimately Tell Us
The most useful insight from the Vanguard study was not that digitization would grow. That part was easy to predict.
The important insight was that digital capability and human relationships would need to improve together.
Five years later, newer research supports the same conclusion. Shippers place significant importance on technology, yet many forwarders still operate with partially manual processes. At the same time, freight remains too variable, regulated and relationship-dependent to run as a completely automated transaction.
The forwarders best positioned to compete are building a blended model:
- Connected systems for rates, documents, tracking and billing
- Clear operational ownership when exceptions occur
- Reliable overseas partners with verified capabilities
- Fast, complete and commercially disciplined quotations
- Human communication when the customer needs judgment, not another status code
That is also the thinking behind ONE Globe Alliance: technology should make collaboration between independent forwarders easier, while the business still happens between accountable companies and people.
Final Thoughts
The biggest freight forwarding challenges are not isolated problems. They form a chain.
Volatile rates pressure margin. Manual processes slow quotations. Fragmented data weakens visibility. Weak partner handoffs create exceptions. Compliance requirements increase the cost of every mistake. Talent gaps make all of the above harder to manage.
The answer is not technology alone, relationships alone or simply working longer hours. It is a more disciplined combination of connected workflows, trusted partners and experienced human judgment.
ONE Globe Alliance helps independent forwarders strengthen the partner and enquiry side of that combination. Companies can register for membership review or book a platform meeting to see how members post enquiries, compare quotations and communicate with overseas forwarders.
Because freight forwarding will always involve surprises. The competitive advantage is making sure fewer of them appear on the final invoice.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the biggest challenges facing freight forwarders?
The major challenges include volatile freight rates, fragmented systems, customer visibility expectations, margin and cash-flow pressure, overseas-agent reliability, increasing compliance requirements and shortages of experienced talent.
How many freight forwarders were included in the survey?
Vanguard Logistics reported that more than 500 customers and non-customers, primarily freight forwarders, participated in its global 2021 survey about LCL shipping and customer needs. This article checks those themes against newer freight-industry research.
Why is digitization difficult for freight forwarders?
Forwarders exchange data with many carriers, agents, customers and authorities using different systems and formats. Replacing one internal spreadsheet does not solve the problem unless information can move reliably across the full workflow.
Why are overseas agents important to freight forwarders?
Overseas agents provide local execution, charges, customs coordination, documentation, delivery support and exception handling. Their performance directly affects the forwarder’s service quality and margin.
How can small freight forwarders compete with multinational companies?
Independent forwarders can compete through specialized expertise, faster decisions, responsive service, clean digital workflows and reliable global partners. A freight-forwarder network can extend international coverage without requiring owned offices in every market.
Can technology solve freight-forwarding challenges?
Technology can reduce repetitive work, improve visibility and connect data, but it cannot remove every disruption or replace commercial judgment. The strongest model combines automation with accountable people and dependable partners.