Freight transport is the physical process of transporting commodities and merchandise goods and cargo. The term shipping originally referred to transport by sea but in American English, it has been extended to refer to transport by land or air as well. "Logistics", a term borrowed from the military environment, is also used in the same sense.
An auction is usually a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from the lowest bidder. Some exceptions to this definition exist and are described in the section about different types. The branch of economic theory dealing with auction types and participants' behavior in auctions is called auction theory.
eBay Inc. is an American multinational e-commerce corporation based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995, and became a notable success story of the dot-com bubble. eBay is a multibillion-dollar business with operations in about 32 countries, as of 2019. The company manages the eBay website, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a wide variety of goods and services worldwide. The website is free to use for buyers, but sellers are charged fees for listing items after a limited number of free listings, and again when those items are sold.
In economics, the word cargo refers in particular to goods or produce being conveyed—generally for commercial gain—by water, air or land. "Freight" is the money paid to carry cargo. Cargo was originally a shipload. Cargo now covers all types of freight, including that carried by rail, van, truck, or intermodal container. The term cargo is also used in case of goods in the cold-chain, because the perishable inventory is always in transit towards a final end-use, even when it is held in cold storage or other similar climate-controlled facility. The term freight is commonly used to describe the movements of flows of goods being transported by any mode of transportation.
An online auction is an auction which is held over the internet. Like auctions in general, online auctions come in a variety of types like ascending English auctions, descending Dutch auctions, first-price sealed-bid, Vickrey auctions and others, which are sometimes not mutually exclusive.
Drop shipping is a form of retail business wherein the seller accepts customer orders but does not keep goods sold in stock. Instead, in a form of supply chain management, it transfers the orders and their shipment details to either the manufacturer, a wholesaler, another retailer, or a fulfillment house, which then ships the goods directly to the customer. As such, the retailer is responsible for marketing and selling a product, but has little or no control over product quality, storage, inventory management, or shipping. This eliminates the costs of maintaining a warehouse – or even a brick and mortar storefront, purchasing and storing inventory, and employing necessary staff for such functions. As in any other form of retail, the seller makes their profit on the difference between an item's wholesale and retail price, less any pertinent selling, merchant, or shipping fees accruing to them.
Drayage is the transport of goods over a short distance in the shipping and logistics industries. Drayage is often part of a longer overall move, such as from a ship to a warehouse. Some research defines it specifically as "a truck pickup from or delivery to a seaport, border point, inland port, or intermodal terminal with both the trip origin and destination in the same urban area". Port drayage is the term used when describing short hauls from ports and other areas to nearby locations. Drayage is a key aspect of the transfer of shipments to and from other means of transportation. The term drayage is also used for the fee paid for such services.
Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers (RBA), or simply Ritchie Bros., is industrial asset disposition & management company, selling heavy industrial equipment and trucks through live and online auctions, and other transactional channels. The company is headquartered in Burnaby, a suburb of Metro Vancouver, and has operations in 12 countries and 40 auction sites worldwide. The company sells through unreserved public auctions, weekly featured auctions at IronPlanet, and various other online marketplaces, a broad range of used and unused industrial assets, including equipment, trucks and other assets utilized in the construction, transportation, agricultural, material handling, mining, forestry, petroleum, and marine industries. Ritchie Bros.' group of companies and solutions also includes Marketplace-E, an online equipment marketplace; Mascus, an online equipment listing service; GovPlanet, an online marketplace for selling surplus government, military and other public agencies' assets; TruckPlanet, a marketplace for the transportation industry; Kruse Energy, an oil & gas auction company; SalvageSale, online auctions for the insurance industry; Leake Car Auctions, a collector car auction company; and Ritchie Bros. Financial Services, an equipment financing and leasing company.
Trailer Bridge, Inc. is a freight service company headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida. They offer international and domestic shipping with primary international calls to San Juan, Puerto Rico and Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. It is one of the few companies offering 53-foot containers, which offer up to 40% more cubic capacity than other container sizes.
Auction software is application software, that can either be deployed on a desktop, on a web server or as a smart contract on a blockchain virtual machine. This software is used by auctioneers and participants of online auctions such as eBay. Smart contracts replace an auctioneer's server, if the auctioneer is not trusted.
The Walton School of Auctioneering is an auction school in Medina, Ohio, United States.
Access America Transport was a third-party logistics provider of transportation and logistics services. The company, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, operated nine offices and serviced customers throughout North America. Access America's services included: truckload shipping, less than truckload shipping, intermodal, specialized transportation, and supply chain management. Access America Transport was one of the fastest growing transportation and logistics service provider in North America.
Surplus Record is the leading independent business directory of surplus, new, and used machine tools, machinery, and industrial equipment in the United States. It was founded in 1924 by Thomas P. Scanlan.
FedBid, Inc. is now known as Unison Marketplace. Unison Marketplace is a privately held company based in Vienna, Virginia, that operates a full-service online marketplace designed to optimize how federal, state and local governments, and educational institutions purchase simple goods and services such as IT products, office supplies and lab equipment, through a reverse auction-based platform.
Shiply is a UK-based limited company providing an internet marketplace where transport service requesters may list items they need to move, and where providers of transport services can bid in a reverse auction format.
A reverse auction is a type of auction in which the traditional roles of buyer and seller are reversed. Thus, there is one buyer and many potential sellers. In an ordinary auction also known as a forward auction, buyers compete to obtain goods or services by offering increasingly higher prices. In contrast, in a reverse auction, the sellers compete to obtain business from the buyer and prices will typically decrease as the sellers underbid each other.
XPO Logistics is an American transportation and contract logistics company that manages supply chains for 50,000 customers worldwide, including 69 of the Fortune 100. It operates in 30 countries, with approximately 100,000 employees. XPO Logistics, Inc. was the 7th best-performing stock of the last decade on the Fortune 500, with its share price rising more than 1,000% from the time its CEO, Brad Jacobs, took control. XPO's corporate headquarters are located in Greenwich, Connecticut, U.S. Its regional headquarters for the European markets are located in Lyon, France.
An auto transport broker is a type of cargo broker that specializes in the shipping and transportation of vehicles. Most vehicles shipped in the U.S. are cars and trucks, but many brokers handle boats, RVs, motorcycles and other types of vehicles as well. Auto transport is classified as "specialized freight trucking" under NAICS code 484230.
CitizenShipper is an American online auction-based peer-to-peer shipping marketplace, which aims to connect shipping customers with couriers and transport providers, especially citizens already driving the customers' routes anyway. The company matches "citizen shippers" to couriers and drivers who bid on the right to fulfill contracts.
Liquidity Services (NASDAQ:LQDT) operates a network of e-commerce marketplaces.
