In early 2022, we built a CO₂ emissions calculation engine that will automatically calculate the emissions for every shipment. Since the reception for the feature has been excellent, we decided to release the CO₂ calculator engine to everyone, not just our customers.
We built a simple user interface on top of it. There are only 5 fields you need to fill in: collection address, delivery address, quantity, package type and weight. To simplify entering addresses, Google Autocomplete is integrated into it as well.
The simple form of the CO2 calculator
Just enter the information, click on „Calculate“ and we’ll automatically calculate the CO₂ equivalent (WTW – well to wheel) emissions for every available transport type. The only transport type that’s yet to be added is rail transport.
The transport prices in Cargoson can come from 4 different sources:
Customer-specific price list that they have agreed with the carrier,
directly from the carrier system,
spot price (one-time offer that the carrier’s representative makes for a specific shipment),
or what we call an online price – many carriers upload and update the price lists that can be used by companies that are yet to agree their own prices with the carrier. This is a way to speed up the response times for spot price requests and this is normally available for routes that the carrier excels at.
Prices originating from the carrier’s software or a spot offer already include an estimated collection and delivery time. Until recently, there was no way to estimate a collection and delivery time for prices that originate from a customer price list or an online price list.
Since most price lists are issued with available collection days and lead times for every route, we built a system that can process those and produce a collection/delivery time estimation alongside the price of the transport.
The ETA is now calculated with the price list prices
Price lists in many other currencies
We started out supporting only the Euro. Over time, we added more currencies to select from when making spot offers. Since Cargoson is expanding to countries all over Europe, customers needed to upload their price lists in other currencies. So we built a system for that.
We also added a default currency feature for every customer: all cargo prices are shown in your currency.
Carriers can assign account managers for their customers
An account manager is the carrier’s representative for a specific customer. Account managers need to be kept up to date with every single spot price request and transport order by the company.
To add an account manager, ask your carrier to look you up from their „My Customers“ section, select an account manager and click „Save“.
John Doe is the sample customer's account manager
Shipment search is now faster
Growth brings technical challenges to every software company. We’ve always wanted to keep our search feature simple but powerful. One example of that is avoiding dozens of different search fields. After all, the most powerful search engine in the world – Google – has just a single search field and two buttons.
Over time, our search performance began to degrade. Some searches for some customers with many shipments could take upwards of 10 seconds. This had to change.
Under the hood, we built a completely new shipment search engine. On average, it’s about 10 times faster than the previous one (for reference, a car is about 10 times faster than a runner!).
New carrier integrations
We're always building new carrier integrations to simplify the work of all Cargoson users. The new integrations that were recently added are:
LinkedIn
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