Uber Freight Adds More Detailed Shipping Info, ETA Predictions

Uber Freight, which has seen an influx of more activity since the pandemic set in, has announced new features that will aid small businesses, the company said in a blog post.

The company, which works to ship items for businesses, says it aims to help small businesses because they’re the “backbone of the American economy,” and have also traditionally been underserved by technology solutions. Instead, they’ve had to rely on outdated and more time-consuming processes.

Uber Freight’s updates since the pandemic include enhanced tendering processes, where shippers can enter more detailed load needs with hours of load time. There’s also lock-in transparent pricing and driver assistance, along with other special considerations.

The company’s end-to-end payments have been streamlined with better invoicing and billing, including instantly available billing pages and experimental expanded payments options for credit cards.

And, the estimated times of arrival (ETAs) are now able to offer customers real-time predictions of when their orders will arrive. In turn, customers can now rate their load experience from 1 to 5 stars, the blog post states.

Uber Freight said in the post that it will continue to look at the market as it stabilizes and the pandemic evolves, and based on that, will continue to grow its network and put shipper needs first. During the pandemic, Uber Freight has seen the number of small businesses using its services grow 10 times year over year. And, hundreds more businesses have continued to onboard every week.

Uber Freight’s operations involve an interactive dashboard where businesses can find reliable capacity, budget for shipping costs, track orders and make sure deliveries getting places on time.

Uber Freight was launched in 2017, and last year it gained a foothold in the $796 billion global trucking industry with operations competing with worldwide leaders like Berlin’s Sennder and U.K.-based Zencargo and FreightHub. The secret seems to be in the company’s removal of the traditional trucking company freight broker role, rather choosing to allow drivers to just pick their own jobs and routes from a list.