The quality of the responses you get from transport providers is set almost entirely by the quality of your brief. A vague brief produces vague quotes that cannot be compared and that fall apart on contact with reality. A complete brief produces accurate, like-for-like responses and lets a matching process route you to providers who can genuinely do the work. This checklist sets out everything a complete transport or distribution brief should specify — work through it before you go to market.
The goods
Describe what you are moving: product type, packaging (pallets, cages, cartons, loose), typical weights and dimensions, and any special characteristics — temperature regime (ambient, chilled, frozen), hazardous/ADR classification, fragility, high value, or awkward handling. These characteristics determine which providers can even be considered, so be precise rather than approximate.
Origins, destinations and lanes
Specify where goods start and finish: collection point(s), and delivery destinations or lanes. Note the delivery environment — retailer RDCs with timed slots, stores, trade counters, sites, hospitals/pharmacies, or direct to consumers — because each carries different access, timing and handling demands. If your geography is national, say so; if it is regional, name the regions, because coverage is a hard filter when matching providers.
Volume and frequency
Give a realistic volume profile: average and peak, by day or week, and the seasonality that shapes it. Honesty about peaks is critical — a provider sized for your average will fail in your peak. Indicate the scale of operation in vehicle terms if you can, as this drives whether dedicated or shared-user models make sense and which providers have the capacity headroom.
Vehicle and handling types
List the vehicle and handling capabilities you need: articulated, rigid, multidrop/van, temperature chilled, temperature frozen, ADR/hazardous, tail-lift, container, curtainsider, flatbed. Every requirement here is a hard filter — a provider must offer all of them to be a genuine candidate — so list what you truly need and avoid padding the list with capabilities you do not.
Service levels
State the service you expect: delivery and collection windows, on-time targets, booking-slot adherence, proof-of-delivery requirements, failed-delivery and returns handling, and acceptable damage/claims levels. Define how performance will be reviewed and reported. Clear service levels let providers price and resource correctly, and let you hold them to account later.
Compliance and trust expectations
Set out the compliance bar: a valid (ideally verified) operator licence, the accreditations relevant to your sector (BRC for food, ISO for quality/environment, FORS for urban work, GDP awareness for healthcare), insurance levels and any audit requirements. On our platform operator licences are DVSA-verified up front, which lets you focus on the sector-specific accreditations that matter to you.
Reporting, systems and contract shape
Specify the visibility you need — tracking, POD, KPI dashboards, integration with your systems — and the contract characteristics: indicative length, start date, and any constraints such as TUPE. Finally, note your decision basis explicitly: you are choosing on capability and trust, not lowest price.
A word on what to leave out
A complete brief is precise, not bloated. Resist the urge to list capabilities you do not actually need — every handling type you specify becomes a hard filter that narrows the field, so padding the list can exclude excellent providers for no reason. Equally, avoid prescribing how the provider should run the operation; describe the outcome you need and the constraints that are genuinely fixed, and let capable providers propose the method. The best briefs are honest about volumes and peaks, clear about service expectations, explicit about compliance, and silent on everything that is really the provider’s job to solve. That balance produces responses that are both comparable and realistic.
Next step
With the brief complete, take it to market using the transport tender / RFP template, or simply submit it as a structured brief here and we will match you to verified providers whose capability fits every requirement on your list.