A freight request rarely arrives as a tidy form. It’s an email, often in Turkish, sometimes in English, with the lane buried in a sentence, the equipment implied, and the weight in a place you’d never put it on purpose. The first job of any operator is translation: turning that prose into a structured request they can actually price.
SHIPO does that translation the moment the email lands. It identifies the client, extracts the lane, equipment, weight, direction and mode, and resolves the named ports to standard UN/LOCODEs so the rest of the system has something unambiguous to work with. None of this requires the client to change how they write to you.
The number behind the number
Parsing is the easy half. The harder half is the price. For sea export, SHIPO checks the shipping lines directly for the live rate. For road and air, it sends an RFQ to the right subcontractor or partner and reads the reply. Then it does the thing operators do from memory, except it doesn’t have to remember: it retrieves comparable shipments you’ve quoted before and shows the won price band, your win rate on the lane, and the carrier you usually book.
By the time an operator opens the card, the quote is already drafted, all-in, with the margin applied. The work that used to mean seven browser tabs and an afternoon is waiting, and it took about ten seconds.
Faster, not unattended
The point isn’t to remove the operator. It’s to hand them a finished draft instead of a blank page. They read it, adjust the margin if the situation calls for it, and send. The speed comes from skipping the retyping, not from skipping the judgement.