[Lesson 5.2] Stacks and routes features

The main focus of the previous lesson was to explain how to create a route to maximize the number of contracted miles vs. empty ones while leveraging your experience and labor. This chapter is oriented toward maximizing profit per each mile driven through more automation by exploring these steps:

  • Step #1: Using stack feature
  • Step #2: Leveraging your routes notifications

Using stack feature

Our shipment stacking tool helps you quickly locate transports that have pick-up and drop-off locations close to those of the shipment you are currently pursuing. This helps you determine if you can combine one shipment with others along your route, allowing you to generate more profit and/or offer the customer a more competitive bid. When looking over new shipping jobs, you'll see the shipment stacking tool just below the list of current bids, under the "Make more profit" heading:

As shown in the example above, the majority of shipments offered are along your route going South to North. You might also want to consider receiving return trip suggestions. In most cases, the trip suggestions will be less than 100 miles in radius each from your original route and therefore, most likely profitable.

The more shipments you combine or stack, the more you save on fuel and time. This increases your earnings and lets you bid lower on each shipment, improving your chances of winning.

While this feature is useful, you will still need to do a little work to make it relevant to you. You will need to check all of the offered shipments to see which customers were last seen most recently to filter them accordingly. We’ll dig into searching for shipments with this manual technique in our next lesson.


Leveraging your routes notifications

Our Routes feature becomes available to you immediately upon signing up with CitizenShipper. After you win your first few shipments, this tool will become increasingly useful. In no time, you’ll wonder what you’d do without it!

A route on CitizenShipper is defined by a starting (origin) and an ending (destination) point - city and state at a minimum - and the name you give it. A route will not be saved unless those items are specified. To create a route, click on the “Add New” button and indicate the city and state of origin and destination, name the route and click on the “Add Route” button. 

Based upon this input, shipments that are posted along that specified route will be sent to you in the form of SMS and email notifications.

Creating a route narrows the number of possible shipment alerts. This can be extremely helpful, but keep in mind we recommend using this feature only when you know in which direction you will be going. To expand or change routes, you can always edit these notifications within your settings menu:


This lesson ends the training on how to best utilize our site features to help win shipments. Next, we will focus on methods and techniques you can utilize to continue your success on CitizenShipper. If you have any questions, please post them in the comments section below!


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