There has been an escalation of auto transport double-brokering since the pandemic that has become a serious matter for carriers, brokers and customers alike. Everyone in the car shipping industry is harmed when double-brokering happens.

Key Takeaways: 

• Auto Transport Double-Brokering can result from customer intention, broker cunning, or carrier duplicity. All 3 cause major headaches. 
• Car transport carriers will shy away from double brokered orders because they can’t count on the vehicle being there. 
• The best thing to do is for a customer to choose one fully vetted broker. 
• The broker should not list a vehicle on a load board without a firm order. 
• A carrier should not job out to a third party, and should deliver the order for which he was hired. 

1. A customer intentionally enters an order with multiple brokers, thinking he’s clever, but not realizing that the confusion he creates on a load board is a disincentive for any carrier to choose his vehicle over others listed only once. 
2. A car shipping broker takes a quote they have given to a customer and without an actual order or customer permission, posts it on a load board, which then collides or competes with an authorized order entered with another broker. 
3. A car transport carrier accepts an order, called a load, from a broker and instead of doing the job as agreed, secretly reassigns it to an often unwitting 3rd party carrier. 

In this article, tapping into our over 20 years of experience, Direct Express Auto Transport will explain the 3 main ways that double-brokering in car shipping happens and why it matters.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a customer performing due diligence, soliciting competitive quotes, and vetting car shipping brokers for experience, expertise, ethical reputation, and positive reviews. You should do that. 

After proper research, about 95% of customers choose one broker to work with, and that is recommended. 

A small minority of customers, about 5%, will muck up their shipment by intentionally ordering from multiple brokers. They think they are creating a competitive advantage by pitting brokers against one another, but here is what most often happens:

• The brokers recognize the same vehicle on the load board more than once with multiple brokers. 
• The year, make & model are the same.
• The origination and destination cities and zip codes are the same.
• The type of trailer (open vs enclosed) and operational condition (running or not) are the same. 
• A carrier will be reluctant to get involved in an uncertain order masked in confusion and will choose loads listed only once. 
• A carrier would be concerned that if he accepted the order from one of the brokers, that by the time he went to pick up the vehicle, one of the other brokers might have assigned it to a rival carrier who got there first.
• By getting involved, a carrier risks wasting his time and considerable expense driving fruitlessly to pick up a vehicle that is no longer there. 
• A carrier that is left holding an empty bag, so to speak, will have also lost the chance at other loads listed only once, and must start over to fill that spot. 
• A prudent and wise carrier will avoid double-brokered loads and gravitate to those vehicles listed only once. Which means the customer is delayed.
• A broker knows that “if” a carrier calls any broker for the load, it will be the one offering the highest price.
• Essentially, the customer guaranteed himself the highest price quoted by all his brokers. 
• Some brokers will play leap frog on the load board, offering ever higher carrier fees that were never agreed to, in order to attract the first phone call from a carrier, and hoping later to convince the customer to pay it. 
• By creating a so-called competitive situation with double-brokered (or triple, quadruple or more) brokers, the customer has invited higher pricing and game playing by some brokers. 

If you are a customer who has multi-brokered his order, the ensuing stress and confusion you have caused will likely result in a higher than necessary car shipping cost for you and considerable aggravation along the way. You can’t do it on the sly, because both the brokers and carriers will see it. Put another way, it is usually self defeating.

1. Some auto transport brokers take their online website quote requests, or phone calls, and without customer permission such as an order, place the information on a car shipping central load board for any carrier to see. If they get a bite, a positive response from a carrier, the broker can circle back to the potential customer. The posted load board price is often artificially inflated to lure a carrier into calling. Sneaky? Deceptive? You bet.

   However, the customer has chosen another broker to work with and now the cunning auto transport broker has created a double-brokering situation not of the customer’s making. 

   The selected broker with a legitimate order is likely the lower priced of the two, and has little chance of receiving a positive response from any carrier, who will of course choose the higher paying posted fee. The customer is cheated. And so is the preferred broker with a real customer deal.

   Brokers Who Buy Customer Leads & Then Double-Broker
   

2. There is a second way a load gets double-brokered by brokers. There are a number of car shipping websites created by companies that are NOT in the car shipping business. The customer lead websites mirror the appearance in almost every way of actual broker sites. 

   The lead websites start off with a quote box that is similar to a real broker site, but string the visitor along into revealing personal information that is not actually necessary to produce a quote. The goal is for those lead generating websites to sell the customer information to auto transport brokers who will buy them. 

   It is easy for a visitor to be fooled. Customers don’t notice words like “partners” or “multiple brokers” or “multiple quotes”. Or even if they did notice, might not understand the meaning. By filling out the form, many visitors don’t realize what will happen next. 

   Here is the information requested on the lead generating auto transport websites:

   • Year, Make & Model … (like a broker)
   • Origination and Destination cities and zip codes … (like a broker)
   • Type of Trailer / Open or Enclosed … (like a broker)
   • Operational Condition / running or not … (like a broker)
   • First Available Shipping Date … (like a broker)
   • Name 
   • Email Address 
   • Phone Number 

   The masquerading auto transport websites that are in reality lead generators will instantly sell your personal information to several brokers at roughly $2 each. They must have at least an email address and preferably also a phone number so the brokers have a way to reach the prospective customer.

Since the lead provider will have anywhere from 3 to 10 broker clients per lead, the seller will make anywhere from $6 to $20 on each visitor to their site without lifting a finger. It is automatic. And legal, in case you’re wondering.

Your email inbox will be inundated with broker quotes. Follow up emails will pour in for weeks.

Your mobile phone will ring incessantly with phone calls from brokers who paid $2 to get your information.

Here’s what many brokers do with your information, regardless of whether you ever communicated with them, much less placed an order:

• List the lead information on a Load Board, which is unethical and against the load board’s policy of listing only contracted orders. It creates double-brokering.
• The broker will check to see how many other brokers have listed the same vehicle shipment and at what price?
• If other brokers have a higher carrier fee, they will refresh their listing without prior customer approval to a higher price, so as to win. They know the highest carrier fee usually gets the first carrier phone call for acceptance.

Many auto transport brokers who list loads without permission, call it double-brokering, try to create plausible deniability to stay out of trouble with the load board. What they are doing is against the rules and they know it. Here are some of the games they play.

Notice the double-brokering culprit may create plausible deniability by changing ever so slightly the model of the vehicle, and one or more zip codes. 

In most cases, everything is unabashedly the same, save the carrier fee, which is usually higher. But even if the listed carrier fee is lower, the fact that the load is listed twice or more, might cause a carrier to avoid it altogether. Harm is done to the customer.

A tell-tale sign for most carriers is when they call a broker to request a listing on the load board, and the broker’s dispatcher puts him on hold. That usually doesn’t happen when the broker has a contract with the customer. The carrier suspects that the broker they called is scrambling to contact the prospective customer, because they don’t have a deal yet, to negotiate a likely higher order total. And the carrier can see the load is double-brokered. 

The broker is probably on the other line to the customer, if he/she answered, and is asking, “Hey Customer, we have a carrier that can transport your vehicle for $200 more, do you want to do it?” The customer does not know whether the carrier in question would have called the broker they hired, and for less, if not for the double-brokering intruder. 

So far we have explored how some customers and some auto transport brokers double-broker vehicle shipments. There is a third nemesis when it comes to it, and that is the carriers themselves, or at least a small minority of them. Less than 10% of all orders are double-brokered according to our analysis of a popular load board. 

A small minority of carriers will search on a load board for above average carrier fees, and knowing the market rate as they do, contact the broker for assignment, thus removing the listing from the board. Then the assigned carrier will repost it, as if the original broker, and reassign the load to an often unwitting third party carrier for a lesser amount. The double-brokering carrier pockets the difference without ever performing the task for which they alone were hired, and contractually agreed to do. 

You need a scorecard to keep track of it.

Sometimes the double-brokering carrier does not repost the load on the same board, but instead, finds a rival board to post the load in search of an unwitting third party carrier. And sometimes they simply know of another carrier to solicit.

The practice of carriers jobbing out loads to other carriers is almost always against the contractual agreement with the original broker. And for good reason. 

• Perhaps the third party carrier has a poor reputation for service and the original broker would never have hired them in the first place.
• The original broker, having been duped, does not know who has his customer’s vehicle, and cannot get status reports.
• If physical damage to the vehicle occurs, the assigned carrier and his third party carrier may squabble about who is liable and whose insurance is to pay. 
• The broker, if he collected the full amount upfront, will likely pay the assigned carrier his fee, who then might not pay the third party carrier, who unwittingly risked getting stiffed.

Fortunately, less than 10% of all vehicle listings are double-brokered. Things could be worse. 

Unfortunately, the auto transport double-brokering orders that are listed on load boards end up costing everyone involved all sorts of problems. From benign annoyances that cost time to unravel, to inflated carrier fees passed on to the customer, to legal ramifications when damages occur, to third party carriers not getting paid. 

Direct Express Auto Transport has been an innovative leader in the car shipping industry since 2004. We originated the instant quote calculator, which is now commonplace throughout the industry. We hasten to add that our quote engine is proprietary and still the best. 

We do not buy leads and only post loads with a completed order. Therefore, we do not double-broker. Ever. Carriers, and even our competitors, know that.