Freightos built trust in freight marketplaces through visual signals like photos and phone numbers, seller payment guarantees, buyer price guarantees, and a clear dispute process. They also defined responsibilities with detailed SOPs and legal frameworks to handle edge cases like unexpected charges.
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So as a B2B marketplace, you know, trust, trust is increasingly important. So, you know, how have you thought about, you know, kind of building that initial trust? And then, you know, some of the, some of the challenges kind of, you know, beyond that when it comes to transactions, such as like repeat purchase and so forth?
Let's start with trust. So, so trust was fun. And some of the things are obvious, and I'm sure you guys know about them, which is like, you know, We would have conversations with people and say, hey, would you book freight online? And they would say 100% no, right? But then we created a couple of mockups. And for example, we showed the picture of the guy who'd be handling the freight and we'd say, hey, would you book freight here? And they'd be like, oh yeah, right? So, it was like little tricks, like the picture, a phone number. A quality stamp, right? Things like that. So, so we knew that, that it was possible, right? That, that, that even though everybody said I would never do this online, and at the time we were also looking at these babysitter sites and we're saying like, if a babysitter site can work, then a freight, you know, marketplace can work. So, but, but then I think what was key and really, really pivotal was understanding what is the value we're giving to each side, like what do they need to trust in? So trust is a very broad kind of thing and we needed to narrow that down. And what we understood is that the sellers needed to know that they would get paid, right? That's really all they cared about. Not all they cared about, but if they knew that they would get paid. And so we said pricing guarantee to the sellers, right? If somebody hits book, you will get paid. Okay, we'll figure out later how we deal with that, right? But we knew that that would keep the sellers on, right? And to the buyers, we said price guarantee. The price isn't going to change because that's what hurt them most is that they would get one price for a move and then they would add this, they would add that, they would add the other thing. And right. So, so for the buyers to know that there was a price guarantee— sorry, the lights just went off here— the price guarantee was, was what they needed. Right. And once we figured that out, That became our trust tenet, and we did everything we needed to do to make that work, right? So on the buyer's side, we created a dispute process, which they would see front and center. If you're getting an addit— there will be additional charges, 'cause if you're shipping, there are probably half of the time there are additional charges because You, you're on the receiving side. You don't actually know how many boxes are going to get sent. So you book 16 boxes. It turns out there's 17 boxes. They need to charge you for 17 boxes. But what we did is we created a very clear process for you to dispute any charge that you were unhappy with. And on the, on the seller side, because we were guaranteeing payment, we needed to do everything we needed to do to make sure we were getting paid because one transaction size, right? You're only taking a little piece of that. You lose one transaction, that can be all your profits for the month or for the year, right? If you lose a full transaction. So that's kind of on the trust side. We did have, we do have reviews, but reviews are tough. Right? Reviews are hard to manage, hard to do right. It's a whole— it's a whole nother topic. But that was very important to us. But I think even more than the reviews and kind of the eye candy of making sure that people felt like they're in a trusted environment was having those guarantees. And we also have a very, very clear— when I was talking about the kind of legal aspects, we have a very, very clear and detailed SOP, which is the standard operating procedure which details out who's responsible in every single case. And we've evolved that over the 6 years or 7 years or 8 years or whatever it is to be really like almost an industry kind of— and people read our SOP and they're like, wow, this is great, right? Because it really takes the time. And this is what you need in businesses. They need, you know, they need to know who's responsible. If things go wrong, right? So I guess, you know, those guarantees, the eye candy, of course, the guarantees, and then the legal, you know, infrastructure to be really clear about who's responsible for what.
