In retail truckload the delivery window is enforced harder than the rate. MABD dates, OTIF scorecards, ASN and label requirements, appointment portals and chargebacks — how the freight side of a retail programme actually works.
Retail and e-commerce freight looks simple from the outside — palletised goods in a dry van, DC to DC. What makes it its own discipline is that the receiving side is instrumented. Large retailers score their suppliers on on-time and in-full performance, publish a routing guide that dictates how freight must be presented, and deduct against the invoice when it is not. The truckload decision therefore has consequences well beyond the linehaul: a cheap truck that misses the window can cost more in deductions than the rate saved.
The second thing that shapes this freight is that its volume is violently seasonal and its shape changes with the channel. Store replenishment is steady, palletised and appointment-driven. E-commerce fulfilment is spikier, often moves in floor-loaded or mixed configurations, and pulls hard into a handful of weeks a year. Returns run the other direction entirely, in January, on the same network. Treating all of it as 'retail freight' is how a shipper ends up with the wrong equipment programme going into Q4.
These profiles need different equipment, different paperwork and different rate expectations. Treating them as one category is the most common reason this freight sits on a board.
| Profile | What it is | Usual equipment |
|---|---|---|
| Store replenishment | Palletised general merchandise moving DC to store or DC to DC on a scheduled cadence. Appointment-driven and scorecarded. | Dry van |
| Softlines & apparel | Hanging garments, cartoned apparel, footwear. Cubes out long before it weighs out; damage and cleanliness matter more than weight. | Dry van |
| Hardlines & general merchandise | Housewares, tools, electronics, toys, sporting goods. Mixed pallets and high SKU counts, so labelling accuracy is what keeps it moving. | Dry van |
| E-commerce fulfilment | Inbound to fulfilment centres and parcel injection into carrier hubs. Tighter windows, more floor-loaded freight, sharper peaks. | Dry van / Power only |
| Seasonal & promotional | Holiday, back-to-school, garden, and dated promotional sets. Value is time-bound — late is often worse than not at all. | Dry van |
| Reverse logistics / returns | Store and customer returns consolidating back to processing centres, heavily concentrated in January. | Dry van |
| Urban & final-mile resupply | Small-format stores, convenience and city-centre locations where a 53-foot trailer cannot legally or physically deliver. | Box truck |
The workhorse of retail. A 53-foot van takes 26 pallets floor-loaded or up to 52 double-stacked when the freight allows, against roughly 44,000–45,000 lb of payload. Most retail freight cubes out first, which is why pallet configuration and stack height matter more here than weight.
Current national benchmarks, and what carriers, brokers and shippers each pay: dry van freight rates →The equipment behind drop-trailer programmes. A preloaded trailer sitting at the dock removes live-load time from both ends and takes the truck out of the detention queue entirely, which is why high-volume retail lanes drift towards it. It requires trailer pool capacity at both ends — that is the real constraint, not the tractor.
Current national benchmarks, and what carriers, brokers and shippers each pay: power only freight rates →Small-format and urban stores where a 53-foot trailer cannot turn, park or legally deliver. Dock height and liftgate availability decide whether the delivery happens; the economics are stops per day rather than miles.
Current national benchmarks, and what carriers, brokers and shippers each pay: box truck freight rates →Used in retail as protective service rather than refrigeration: chocolate and confectionery, cosmetics, some electronics and batteries, and anything travelling through the northern tier in winter that must not freeze. A summer trailer can exceed 130°F, which ruins more retail freight than cold does.
Current national benchmarks, and what carriers, brokers and shippers each pay: reefer freight rates →Rates on this freight follow the equipment, not the industry — a pallet of canned goods and a pallet of hardware price the same in the same van. See all market rates per mile or the weekly market reports.
None of this is federal. All of it is contractual, it varies by retailer, and it is where retail freight money is actually won and lost. Read the current routing guide; do not work from last year's.
| MABD — must arrive by date | The date the purchase order must be delivered by. It is a hard boundary, and on most programmes there is also a not-before boundary. Early delivery is a violation, not a favour. |
| OTIF scorecards | Major retailers score suppliers on on-time and in-full delivery and apply deductions below threshold. The threshold, the measurement method and the fine all vary by retailer and change over time — treat the current supplier agreement as the only source. |
| Appointment portals | Most large DCs schedule receiving through their own portal. Slots are finite and fill up, so the appointment is often the real constraint on the ship date, not the truck. |
| ASN / EDI 856 | The advance ship notice tells the DC what is arriving before it arrives. A missing or inaccurate ASN is one of the most common chargeback causes, and it is a data failure rather than a freight failure. |
| Pallet and carton labelling | GS1-128 pallet licence plates and carton labels in the specified format and position. A correct pallet with an unreadable label is treated as an unidentified pallet. |
| Pallet standard and exchange | Whether the programme runs on pooled pallets, exchange, or one-way pallets, and who owns the balance. This is a real cost line that is frequently left undefined. |
| Stack height and overhang | Maximum pallet height, whether double-stacking is permitted, and no overhang past the pallet edge. Overhang is both a damage cause and a receiving rejection. |
| Trailer condition standards | Many retail programmes specify a clean, dry, odour-free trailer and reject on trailer condition alone — especially for apparel, food-adjacent goods and anything absorbent. |
Capacity on this freight is close to constant through the year. Demand is not, and that gap is what moves the rate.
| Period | What happens |
|---|---|
| Jan–Feb | Returns season and the annual volume floor. Freight flows backwards through the network while new inbound volume collapses. Capacity is abundant and cheap. |
| Mar–May | Spring resets, garden and outdoor sets, and the first serious promotional calendar of the year. Volume climbs steadily and predictably. |
| Jun–Aug | Back-to-school builds through July and August, and it competes for capacity with peak produce and peak flatbed season. Van capacity is tighter than the retail volume alone would suggest. |
| Sep–Nov | The hard peak. Q4 inventory has to be in position before the selling season, so this is the stretch with the least schedule flexibility and the highest cost of missing a window. Book capacity ahead rather than in the spot market. |
| Dec | Falls away sharply once holiday inventory is in position, usually after the second week. Receiving appointments also thin out as DCs move into inventory counts. |
| The appointment, not the truck, sets the date | If the DC's portal has no slot until Thursday, the load delivers Thursday regardless of how fast the truck is. Build the appointment into the plan, not into the transit time. |
| Early is a violation | Arriving before the not-before date can mean refusal, a return trip or a deduction. A driver who runs hard and arrives two days early has not helped. |
| Live unload queues at big DCs | High-volume receiving docks run long. Where the volume justifies it, drop-trailer or power-only removes this problem outright rather than managing it. |
| Detention is systematically under-counted | Because slow receiving is normal in retail, free time and detention rates get treated as boilerplate. Agree them explicitly. See the detention pay policy. |
| Chargebacks are mostly data, not driving | A missing ASN, a mislabelled pallet or a wrong pallet count generates a deduction even on a load that delivered perfectly on time. Fix the data side before renegotiating the rate. |
| Reschedules and refusals | A missed window usually means a new appointment, which is a layover or a redelivery rather than detention. See the layover policy and the TONU policy. |
Every one of these is an accessorial with a written LoadBoot standard, agreed before the truck moves rather than argued about after: detention, layover, TONU, lumper fees, driver assist and FCFS versus appointment.
The routing guide is the governing document. Unlike food or open-deck freight, retail truckload has no commodity-specific federal rule. What it has is the retailer's supplier and routing requirements, which cover delivery windows, appointment procedure, labelling, ASN transmission, pallet standards, trailer condition and the financial consequence of missing any of them. It is contractual, it differs between retailers, and it is revised — the current version is the only one worth reading.
OTIF and chargebacks. On-time-in-full programmes measure the supplier, not the carrier, which is why the freight decision sits with whoever owns the PO. The practical consequence is that transport cost and deduction cost have to be looked at together: on a scorecarded programme, the cheapest truck is frequently not the cheapest outcome.
Carmack still applies to the freight itself. Damage, shortage and delay claims on interstate truckload run under the Carmack Amendment. Retail's contractual penalties sit on top of that, not instead of it — and the two are settled through completely different processes.
Urban delivery limits. Small-format and city-centre stores commonly have length, height, weight and time-of-day restrictions on the streets around them, plus loading-zone rules. These are municipal and they are real: they decide the equipment before anything else does.
This is general operating information, not legal advice. Regulations are amended and state rules vary — confirm current requirements for your commodity and route before relying on them.
Rate is rarely why this freight sits. It sits because a carrier cannot tell from the posting whether the load is legal on his trailer, how long he will wait, or what he gets paid if it goes wrong. Six things fix most of that.
| MABD and the not-before date | Both boundaries, explicitly. A window with only one end stated is the single most common cause of a refused retail delivery. |
| Appointment status | Whether the appointment is already booked, who books it, and the portal or process involved. If the carrier has to book it, say so before booking the truck. |
| Pallet count, stack height and weight | Pallets, whether they are stackable, the loaded height, and the actual weight. Retail freight usually cubes out, so pallet count without height is not a spec. |
| Labelling and ASN responsibility | Who applies pallet labels, in what format, and who transmits the ASN and when. |
| Live load/unload or drop | Live at both ends, drop at one, or a full drop-and-hook programme — and where the trailer pool sits. This changes the equipment and the price more than the mileage does. |
| Delivery site constraints | For small-format and urban stores: street restrictions, delivery time windows, dock height, liftgate need and where the truck can legally stop. |
Post a retail and e-commerce load → · Why posting is free for brokers and shippers →
MABD is the must-arrive-by date on the purchase order — the last day the load can be delivered against that PO. Most retail programmes pair it with an earliest-acceptable date, because a distribution centre schedules labour, dock doors and put-away capacity against a plan. Freight that shows up days early has no slot, no crew and no storage assigned to it, so it is refused or accepted with a deduction. Early and late are both misses against the same window.
In freight terms, far more of them come from data than from driving. A missing or inaccurate ASN, a pallet label in the wrong format or the wrong position, a pallet count that does not match the paperwork, overhang past the pallet edge, or a stack height above the programme's maximum will all generate deductions on a load that arrived on time and undamaged. Fixing the labelling and ASN side is usually cheaper and faster than renegotiating the linehaul.
When the same lane runs often enough that trailer pool capacity at both ends is cheaper than the live-load and detention time it removes. Drop-and-hook takes the truck out of the receiving queue entirely, which on a slow dock is worth more than any rate negotiation. The constraint is the trailers, not the tractors — see the power only rate page.
Yes, as protective service rather than refrigeration. Chocolate and confectionery, cosmetics, candles, some electronics and battery products, and anything that must not freeze crossing the northern tier in winter are all routinely moved in a reefer running on cycle or as a heater. Heat is the more common loss: an unventilated dry van in summer can exceed 130°F.
Far enough ahead that you are not competing for it in September. The Q4 build is the least flexible stretch of the retail year — the inventory has to be in position before the selling season, so a missed week cannot be made up later. The spot market during that window prices exactly that inflexibility.
It prices as dry van, because that is what it is — the retail programme adds requirements, not a different rate basis. Where retail freight does cost more is in the accessorial tail: detention at slow docks, layover after a missed appointment, and redelivery. Current dry van benchmarks are on the dry van rate page.
Posting is free for brokers and shippers — no subscription and no per-post fee. Every carrier who can accept your load has had authority, insurance and safety checked first, every load carries live GPS, and the accessorial terms above are written down before the truck moves.