What freight forwarding BPO is
Freight forwarding BPO (business process outsourcing) is the practice of handing a forwarder's repeatable back-office work to a dedicated offshore team that runs it as an extension of your own staff. Instead of hiring locally for booking, documentation, data entry, and track-and-trace, you contract an outside provider whose people do that work for you, usually from a lower-cost hub.
The established hubs are the Philippines and India, with a growing Middle East presence; providers in this guide run teams across all three. The model is well understood and widely used: a forwarder keeps its customer relationships, its commercial judgment, and its exception handling in-house, and moves the high-volume routine processing to an offshore team it directs. What you are buying is dedicated human capacity, billed per person or per hour, that you scale by adding people as your volume grows.
This guide covers what the model is, what forwarders typically outsource and what they keep, who the established vendors are, what published rate cards say it costs in 2026, and where a newer option, automation, now fits alongside it.
What forwarders outsource (and what to keep)
The work forwarders outsource is the high-volume, rule-based processing that follows a predictable pattern, and the established providers staff much the same set. On the operational side it covers booking and shipping-instruction preparation and submission against carrier cut-offs, bill of lading drafting and checking, and the surrounding documentation: MAWB and HAWB preparation, pre-alerts, delivery orders, and arrival notices. It extends into customs and compliance work, including advance-manifest and import filings such as ENS, AMS, and ISF, and into track-and-trace, where the offshore team monitors milestones and flags delays. On the finance side it covers freight billing, invoice preparation, accounts payable and receivable, freight-bill audit, and collections. First-line customer service, answering routine status queries, rounds out the typical scope.
What experienced forwarders keep in-house is the work that turns on judgment, relationships, or accountability: the commercial decisions, the exceptions that do not fit the template, the customer relationships that drive repeat business, and the regulated calls where a person has to be the one on record. The practical rule most providers and their clients converge on is straightforward: outsource the repeatable processing, keep the work that needs judgment.
The freight BPO vendor landscape
The freight BPO market is fragmented, a mix of freight specialists, general offshore staffing firms that take logistics work, and software vendors that also run a BPO arm. The point worth noting for 2026 is that the serious players have bolted software and automation onto their offshore teams. The vendors below are described from their own published materials.
Expedock (expedock.com/bpo) is the leading freight-document automation vendor, and it now sells what its BPO page calls "BPO Tech-enabled Staffing Services," a "fully managed staffing solution, powered by AI," with, in its words, "leaves and attrition are fully integrated into our business model."
NewAge Global (newage-global.com) is a freight-forwarding software vendor, maker of the NewageNXT TMS, that also runs a BPO. Its teams cover sales support and customer service, operations, EXIM documentation such as MAWB and HAWB drafting, pre-alerts, delivery orders, and arrival notices, plus finance and accounting and key account management, working on NewageNXT or, as it puts it, "another platform, or a homegrown system," from offices across the Middle East, India, and the Americas.
Odak Solutions (odaksolutions.com) is a logistics BPO founded in 2019, offering freight operations execution, documentation and compliance management, shipment tracking, freight billing and finance, and customer operations.
FreightBridge BPO (freightbridgebpo.com) runs offshore in-office teams with a US presence, covering freight forwarding back office across, in its words, "booking, docs, customs, and client comms," with 24/7 support across US time zones.
Infinity IPS (infinity-logisticsbackoffice.com), in business since 1998, provides back office for forwarders, NVOCCs, 3PLs, and customs brokers, spanning accounts payable and receivable, freight billing and documentation, freight data analytics, and its own API, bot, and automation services, including bots for document management and APIs for real-time tracking.
ShoreAgents (shoreagents.com) is a general virtual-assistant staffing firm with a published shipping-VA rate card; it is logistics-adjacent rather than freight-specialist. My Freight Staff (myfreightstaff.com) is a freight-industry-specialized staffing firm placing logistics-trained virtual assistants. The long tail includes names like Valoroo, Corpshore, and OBP.
The pattern across the serious vendors is consistent: NewAge pairs its BPO with a TMS, Infinity layers bots and automation onto its offshore desks, and Expedock markets its teams as AI-powered. The category is converging on AI-assisted people, which sets up the third option below.
What it costs
Two kinds of figures show up in this category: the per-hour rate a forwarder pays for an offshore seat, and the cost-savings percentages vendors advertise against hiring in-house. Both are vendor-published, and both are framed here as the source's own claim, not as a neutral market rate. They are 2026 figures.
On per-hour rates, the published cards cluster in a clear band. ShoreAgents' 2026 shipping-VA rate card lists entry-level work at $8 to $12 per hour, experienced coordinators at $14 to $22 per hour, and specialist roles at $25 to $40 per hour, and frames the pitch as a shipping VA at $10 to $20 per hour against $40 to $70 per hour for in-house staff. My Freight Staff, a freight-industry staffing firm, advertises logistics-specialized virtual assistants starting at $8.50 per hour. Taken together, vendor rate cards published by offshore staffing providers in 2026 run roughly $8 to $22 per hour for routine freight and shipping coordination, with specialist roles higher.
On savings, vendors advertise their own numbers, and these are marketing claims rather than independent benchmarks. NewAge advertises "67-69% average cost savings" using its BPO versus hiring in-house. Odak advertises cutting operational costs "by up to 40%." Several providers, including FreightBridge and Infinity, state a cost benefit without publishing a single headline percentage; Infinity's pitch leans on its automation layer, including bots for document management, rather than on a rate. Read each percentage as the vendor's own advertised figure for its own service, not as a category-wide saving you can assume.
The structural point underneath the numbers is the same in every case: each figure prices a person or a seat. Going offshore lowers the per-unit rate, but you still scale cost by adding people as volume grows. That is the cost behavior the next section, and the linked comparison, examines.
The third option: an AI workforce
The vendor pattern above points to a third option. If the serious freight BPOs are already adding software, bots, and AI to their offshore teams, the next step is an AI workforce that performs the routine operational task itself, under your team's supervision, rather than a person doing it with software assistance.
That is the model Expedion runs: a managed AI workforce for freight forwarding operations, priced on the volume handled rather than on a seat count, with your team holding the approval gates and the audit trail. It is not a wholesale replacement for an offshore team; carrier-side execution runs in supervised production with design partners, not general availability, and the way to test it is a two-week pilot on your own shipments. Many forwarders run both, keeping the judgment-heavy work with people and putting a defined slice of high-volume routine work onto agents.
For the full side-by-side of in-house hiring, a BPO or offshore VA, and an AI workforce, see BPO vs an AI workforce.
Frequently asked questions
What is freight forwarding BPO?
Freight forwarding BPO is business process outsourcing for forwarders: handing repeatable back-office work, such as booking, documentation, customs filings, track-and-trace, and freight accounting, to a dedicated offshore team that runs it as an extension of your staff, usually from a lower-cost hub such as the Philippines or India. You keep your customer relationships, commercial decisions, and exception handling in-house and move the high-volume routine processing to the provider, billed per person or per hour.
What can a freight forwarder outsource?
The work that is repeatable and rule-based: booking and shipping-instruction submission, bill of lading and documentation (including MAWB and HAWB, pre-alerts, delivery orders, and arrival notices), customs and advance-manifest filings such as ENS, AMS, and ISF, track-and-trace, freight billing and accounts payable and receivable, and first-line customer service. What forwarders keep in-house is the judgment-heavy and relationship-heavy work: the exceptions that do not fit the template, the commercial calls, the customer relationships, and the regulated decisions where a person has to be on record.
How much does freight BPO cost?
Published 2026 vendor rate cards cluster in a clear band. ShoreAgents lists shipping VAs at $8 to $12 per hour entry-level, $14 to $22 experienced, and $25 to $40 for specialists, and My Freight Staff advertises freight-specialized VAs starting at $8.50 per hour. Taken together, offshore rate cards run roughly $8 to $22 per hour for routine freight coordination, with specialists higher. On savings, vendors advertise their own figures, for example NewAge's 67-69% versus in-house and Odak's up to 40%; treat each as that vendor's marketing claim, not a category-wide rate. The figure that matters for your decision is structural: you are paying per seat, and the cost scales as you add people.
BPO or automation, which should I choose?
It depends on the work. A BPO or offshore VA gives you dedicated human capacity and judgment, billed per seat and scaled by adding people; an AI workforce puts the routine, repeatable task itself onto agents under your governance, priced on the volume handled rather than on headcount. The two are not mutually exclusive, and many forwarders run both, keeping relationship-heavy and exception work with people and automating a defined slice of high-volume routine work. The companion comparison page, BPO vs an AI workforce, lays out the full side-by-side of in-house hiring, a BPO or offshore VA, and an AI workforce on the unit you buy, how it scales, and who governs it.