BENCHMARKS · QUOTE SPEED
Quote response time vs win rate.
Two numbers decide a quote desk's week: how long an RFQ waits for a price, and how often that price wins. This page gathers what is actually on record about both — primary sources named, vendor heuristics labelled — because 'everyone knows quoting is slow' deserves better evidence than a feeling.
PRIMARY SOURCES CITED · VENDOR CLAIMS LABELLED · UPDATED JULY 2026
Response time: how long an RFQ waits
The canonical dataset on quote speed. Freightos repeatedly posed as a real shipper and requested quotes from the world’s twenty largest forwarders — measuring both how long the answer took and whether one came at all:
| Edition | Finding | As reported by |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Only 1 of the top 20 offered instant online quotes; average response 15 hours | Supply Chain Dive |
| 2017 | 101 hours average for a manual spot quote; only 9 of 20 quoted; 3 of 20 followed up | FreightWaves |
| 2018 | 57-hour average; 72% failed to quote; 58% average price spread between quotes | Lloyd's Loading List / Air Cargo Week |
| 2021 | 60% of quote requests produced no quote; only 8% of quoters followed up | Air Cargo World / Air Cargo Next |
PRIMARY: FREIGHTOS MYSTERY SHOPPER RESEARCH. THE OFT-QUOTED '90 HOURS' FIGURE IS A DERIVATIVE CITATION — WE CITE THE PRIMARIES.
Rippey AI ran the same experiment in 2022 across 86 forwarders: 31% responded at all, with an average response time of roughly 50 hours — independently confirming the Freightos pattern.
Win rate: what speed does to it
The link between the two numbers is where the evidence gets thin. Published win-rate-by-speed tables are vendor heuristics (no peer-reviewed primary exists), so we label them as such: figures like “sub-30-minute responses win 78%+” circulate from vendor studies. What we can report as observed fact, on one named desk: at Infinity Logistics FZE, win rate rose from 35% to 73% as median quote response fell from more than 60 minutes to about 15 — their numbers, their name on them.
| Metric | Before | After | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quote response (median) | 60+ min | about 15 min | Deployment-measured |
| Win rate | 35% | 73% | Deployment-measured |
| Daily quote volume | ~120 | 225+ | Deployment-measured |
| Draft time (median) | ≈ 1 hour | 21 seconds | Deployment-measured |
SOURCE: FREIGHAI DEPLOYMENT AT INFINITY LOGISTICS FZE, UAE — SIGNED CUSTOMER REFERENCE. SINGLE-DEPLOYMENT DATA; YOUR LANES AND MIX WILL VARY.
Why the response window keeps shrinking
Response time is not only a sales metric; the buy rate underneath the quote sets a deadline of its own. Here is how fast carrier spot rates now expire:
| Carrier platform | Validity / guarantee |
|---|---|
| Hapag-Lloyd Quick Quotes Spot | Rate valid 3 hours; vessel-space guarantee |
| CMA CGM SpotOn | 24 hours (72 with Lock My Price); >60% of CMA's spot volume |
| Maersk Spot | Fixed price + loading guarantee; confirmation ~25 seconds |
| Traditional FCL rate card | To the 15th or end of month |
| Air rates | Typically 3–7 days |
SOURCES: CARRIER PRODUCT PAGES (MAERSK.COM, CMA-CGM.COM, HAPAG-LLOYD.COM), JULY 2026.
A three-hour buy-rate window makes a 57-hour quoting process not just slow but structurally impossible — by the time the manual quote goes out, the rate underneath it has expired eighteen times over.
Why a fast quote still has to be complete
Speed only wins if the price survives the invoice. Industry benchmarks put forwarder gross margins at 10–20% of revenue and net margins near 3–4%(median ~2.9% in IBISWorld data as cited by GoFreight). On margins that thin, a single missed surcharge line can erase a shipment’s entire profit — which is why surcharge completeness belongs in every speed conversation.
This page will host our quarterly quote-speed benchmark — anonymized response-time distributions, win-rate-by-speed bands and coverage data from live desks. The industry’s canonical studies stopped running regularly; we intend to continue the series.
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