This summer, reader Manuel Chavez came across a 2011 story I wrote that mentioned the then-brand-new freight marketplace “No Broker Freight,” a project of Ohio-based broker Dave Fussi, who hoped to deliver direct-ship freight to owner-operators and small fleets and essentially eliminate the middleman.
Read that 2011 piece via this link.Chavez wrote to me a couple months ago to note he’d signed on for a subscription to check out whether the product stood as advertised today, some five years later, and found nothing at all that was unbrokered in the freight department. Worse, “the load-search filter does not have a date filter,” he wrote. “Most of the loads (not one from a direct shipper) were from March” of this year. Chavez found not a single one dated the month he was searching.
Furthermore, there was no obvious option to cancel the subscription, and when the initial period of subscription was up this month, Chavez was charged again for a renewal, despite repeated messages left for the board’s customer service line. No one called back, until today. I found Fussi via the telephone number to a related business, NationalFreightShippers.com, this morning and repeated Chavez’ frustrations, to which Fussi responded by moving Chavez to free status and stating he would refund the charges.
From what Fussi tells me, it sounds like this service, one of the first among many in subsequent years out there to advertise itself as removing the broker from the freight picture for small fleets, is in an indeterminate limbo — one might even call it as an indefinite hiatus as regards direct-ship freight, though Fussi says it’s still populated to one degree or another with third-party brokered loads — pending what Fussi hopes will be outside funding to staff up to deliver a useful product.
“Everybody who had joined in the past, we’re going to give them all kinds of free time,” says Fussi, in the meantime. As intimated above, as Chavez’ situation attests, that may not be happening automatically, as it were. If you’re in a situation similar to Chavez’ and you need to get in touch with Fussi, use the National Freight Shippers phone rather than that listed for No Broker Freight. Here’s the number: 855-585-4537.
As for other services marketing themselves as reducing the take of or eliminating the middleman in freight transactions — anybody having luck with a proven player to date?
Find all of our stories about the so-called “Uberization of trucking” via this link.
