What Shippers Actually Need From Your Customer Portal

To build a better visibility experience, you have to start with a simple question:

“What do importers and exporters actually need from their portal?”

Most shippers aren’t thinking in container milestones or transit legs. They’re managing:

• Purchase orders
• Inventory forecasting
• Procurement decisions

Their real questions sound more like:

• When will this PO arrive?
• Do we need to reorder this SKU?
• How much do we have in transit right now?

Why Forwarder Tech Falls Short

Most forwarders’ customer portals are optimized around shipment data: container IDs, legs, vessel status. But shippers think in products, quantities, and timelines.

That mismatch creates constant friction:

• Even with a portal, they can’t get the full story without also piecing together emails and spreadsheets.
• They abandon the portal because it’s too hard to use.
• They revert to email—not because they want to, but because it works.

The Shift: Shipper-Centric Thinking

To serve shippers better, forwarders need to flip the model.

That means:

• Linking container and shipment data to POs and SKUs
• Letting customers search by their own identifiers (PO numbers, part numbers)
• Presenting workflows based on procurement planning, not freight booking
  

As one shipper put it:

“If I could search by PO and see what’s in transit, I wouldn’t be chasing emails all day.”

Your Strategic Edge: Empathy

Portals built for logistics teams get ignored.

Portals built for shippers become indispensable.

That’s the idea behind Logixboard’s Connected Experience: a shipper-first customer portal that bridges operational visibility with procurement logic—so your customers get the answers they actually care about.

Empathy for the end user isn’t just good UX. It’s a competitive advantage.