Groupage Freight: How Shared Load Shipping Works

Groupage freight is the combining of consignments from several different senders into one load, so a single pallet or a handful of cases can cross a country without anyone hiring a vehicle. In sea freight the same practice is sold as LCL, a groupage container; the rest of this page covers road groupage.

The word describes the service from the forwarder’s side of the desk. The forwarder buys vehicle capacity, sells it by the consignment, and does the work of building the loads and pulling them apart again. Your goods keep their own transport order, their own sender and their own consignee; what they share is the deck.

How a groupage consignment travels

Collection comes first. A local vehicle brings the consignment into the forwarder’s depot, where it is booked in, measured, weighed and marked so it can be told apart from everything else on the floor.

At the depot it is sorted by destination area instead of by sender, then built into a load with the other consignments heading that way. That load runs as one movement on the line haul leg to a depot or hub near the delivery area.

At the far end the load is taken apart again, the step the trade calls deconsolidation, and each consignment joins the delivery schedule for its area. That is where the trade-off sits: groupage freight is handled again at every depot it passes, and the extra handling is what buys the lower rate.

What decides the price

A groupage tariff starts from the cost of running the vehicle over the leg, distance, driver hours, tolls and depot handling, divided across the consignments on board. Your share rests on two measures: a forwarder’s tariff carries a rule for turning the loading metres or volume a consignment occupies into a chargeable weight, and rates the consignment on that or on its real gross weight, whichever is higher. A bulky pallet is rated on the room it blocks.

What the delivery end needs is settled at booking, because the local round is built before your consignment reaches the depot. A kerbside drop with no forklift, a receiver who only unloads in a booked window, a street a full size vehicle cannot turn in: raise one of those after the sort and the round is rebuilt around you, which is where an invoice above the quote comes from.

What can share a vehicle

Grouping only works if the goods can travel together, and the first question is stacking. A consignment that cannot take weight on top blocks the space above it, and the forwarder prices that space whether or not anything sits there.

Then the goods themselves. Temperature controlled freight needs a vehicle held at that temperature for everything on board. Dangerous goods carry rules about what may be loaded alongside what, so a groupage desk takes only certain classes or declines them. Food is kept away from anything that gives off a smell, and fragile, oversized or high value goods often stay off a shared deck.

Groupage, part load and full load

These sit on a scale rather than in separate boxes. Groupage is the European name for the service and covers the same ground as an LTL operation; consolidation is the same activity from the operations side.

A part load is the step up: enough volume to ride on one vehicle alongside a few other consignments, skipping the depot sort and the second handling. Above that sits full truckload (FTL), the point at which you stop sharing the deck at all. Each step up buys fewer handovers and a firmer date, so compare on handling and the date you can promise, not on the rate alone.

Where groupage goes wrong

Cut-off is the first trap, and it catches the consignment rather than the vehicle. Miss the sort and the truck you were booked onto leaves on schedule without you while your consignment slips a whole cycle, so the date you promised the receiver moves though nothing went wrong with the transport.

Identity is the second. In a mixed load the labels are what keep a consignment yours, so mark each handling unit so it can be identified from whichever side the forklift comes at it, and make the piece count on the paperwork match what went on the vehicle.

Evidence is the third. A shared consignment is signed for several times on the way, so a claim turns on which handover it was still sound at. The consignment note is the only record that travels with the goods, so put your reservations on it when the pallet is taken over and again when the receiver signs, and photograph anything that looks wrong before it moves on.