subject: What Is An Ltl Service? [print this page] Many courier services offer much more to their customers than simple package delivery. Many offer a much larger scale of service to those who need to move freight shipments around the country using large trucks and trailers. Once you graduate to using these larger vehicles for moving your goods though, you run into different classifications of the types of services that you need to choose from when hiring your shipping. One of the options that you are going to be most commonly presented with is that of LTL shipping.
LTL is along with FTL one of the two primary options that you have when shipping with a larger sized trucking company. LTL stands for less than truck load, and FTL means full truck load. These are basically the two ways that larger trucking companies organize their delivery types. FTL means that you will be the only person shipping in a given truck, whereas in an LTL shipping situation you will be sharing the available trailer space with anywhere from one to several other clients of the courier company.
LTL companies operate by finding several clients that need to ship in the same general direction. They try to load as much cargo as they can onto a truck going in a given direction by combining loads from as many clients as necessary. They do this because a full truck is a more profitable truck.
The upswing of this is that because the truck is full of cargo from multiple clients, many of the costs of shipping are shared between several different organizations. When you ship FTL, all of those costs are going to be paid by you, and you alone. LTL is almost always the more economical of the two shipping options, which is why so many people opt for it when it is practical. Usually, an LTL shipment can be a good choice if you're shipping cargo that falls anywhere in the 100 to 10,000 lb weight class.
There are a few downsides to LTL shipping, but these are offset in most people's minds by the cost savings. The one potential downswing is that it can take longer for your deliveries to be completed when you ship LTL as opposed to FTL. That is because the deliveries need to be made in order to satisfy all the clients, and preference cannot be given. This can cause your deliveries to take slightly longer than they would if you were shipping FTL instead.
