Learning to find shipments on CitizenShipper is key to success. It’s simple but requires time and commitment. In this lesson, you'll learn:

1: Navigating Your Dashboard and Recommended Shipments
2: Responding Quickly to Shipment Notifications
3: Using the Shipment Search Tool for Smarter Route Planning
4: Applying Pro Tips to Evaluate and Win More Shipments

Looking for shipments on your Dashboard

When you log in to CitizenShipper using your email and password, you will be taken to your Dashboard. There, you should see a list of shipments in the Recommended Tab - these recommendations match your chosen categories and routes. 

You can also click the other tabs (Active, Booked, and others) to see your active bids on shipments, the shipments you've won and delivered, or all open shipments listed on CitizenShipper. 

Engaging with shipments from notifications

As a driver, you’ll automatically receive email or text notifications when new shipments match your routes or categories. These alerts are critical because they give you the chance to be among the first to contact potential customers. Quick responses not only increase your chances of winning shipments but also show customers you’re reliable and responsive, which helps build trust.

Using the Shipment Search Tool

Your recommended shipments tab shows dozens of new listings daily. To plan routes and move multiple items at once, use the Shipment Search Tool — it lets you set custom parameters, adding efficiency, cost savings, and profitability to each trip.

Here's how it works:

From your Dashboard on the CitizenShipper site, you should be able to see the search bar in the upper left corner of your screen. If you're on a mobile device, the search bar should appear near the top of your screen:

Simply click "Search shipments" to open the Shipment Search Tool, which allows you to set the parameters of your search by pick-up address, delivery address, date, weight , and category:

At this point, we recommend trying out the Shipment Search Tool to see what shipments are going out of your state. As you can see in the picture above - we can input the Pickup location and leave the Delivery address blank; this will let us see what shipments start in your desired pickup location and vise versa with the delivery. 

Additionally, you can also use the search tool for regional searches by specifying multiple states of/and pick up and delivery you're interested in:

This tool will be especially useful when looking to create a route plan (more on this in future lessons).

Pro Tips

Each shipment listing comes with 4 important pieces of information that are relevant for your bidding decision:

1. The preferred shipping date. The +/- indicates that the customer has flexibility to receive their pet between the 18th of September and 21st of September. ( Dates can vary here) 

2. How long ago the customer posted the listing (17h ago in the example below)

3. When was the customer last seen on the website (16h ago in the example below)

4. It is mandatory to send a bid before engaging with the customer. In order to get a better understanding of the customers needs. A bid is mandatory to engage with them and to get more information in order to assist them with ease. 

To recognize and filter the ones looking for a quote from the ones looking to book someone, keep track of when the customer was last seen on the site and make sure that this was AFTER they posted the shipment (meaning that "seen X time ago" is closer to real-time then "posted").

Customers posting shipments aren’t usually logging in as often as drivers. That’s why one of the best ways to gauge a customer’s intent is by checking when they were last active on the site.

For example:

• If a shipment was posted 11 hours ago, but the customer was last seen just 31 minutes ago, it’s a strong sign they’re actively looking to book a driver soon.
  
  
• On the other hand, if the customer was last seen around the same time they posted the shipment, it usually means they haven’t checked back yet and may not be ready to hire immediately.
  
  

In the next lesson, we are going to cover how to communicate with clients and win the shipment! Get ready!

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