The first decision on any new request is where the buy-rate comes from, and it’s surprisingly subtle. It depends on two things the email already tells you: the direction (import or export) and the mode (sea, road or air). Get that routing wrong and you price the wrong leg from the wrong source.
For a sea export, the rate is on the carrier’s own site, so SHIPO checks the lines directly. For road and air, there’s no public rate to scrape, so it sends an RFQ to the right subcontractor or partner and parses their reply into a buy rate. The mode decides the method, automatically.
The leg flips with direction
Here’s the part that trips up new operators. A forwarder sitting in Türkiye prices the foreign leg, but the foreign leg is the destination on an export and the origin on an import. So vendor selection has to flip with direction, and pick the right contact for that direction too. SHIPO encodes that asymmetry instead of leaving it to memory.
One board, every mode
For the operator, none of this is visible as complexity. A request comes in, it gets routed, priced, and drafted, whether it’s an FCL export to Rotterdam or a full-truck import from Poland. The mode-specific machinery runs underneath; the experience on top is the same card, the same review, the same one-click send.