Once you make the change from using a regular parcel carrier to make your deliveries and are using a full scale shipping company, you're going to encounter some different terminology that may be unfamiliar. If your delivery MA company deals in using full scale trucking operations then the two terms that you are most likely to encounter that you might be unfamiliar with are FTL and LTL shipping.
Both of these terms are referring to a different structure which the company will use to determine how their trucks are loaded. LTL means less than truck load, whereas FTL means full truck load. Full truck load is when a company will hire the use of an entire truck for only their own use. This does give you much greater control over where the truck will go, but it is typically more expensive than shipping on an LTL basis.
When you ship Less than Truck Load, it means that you are only going to be responsible for hiring as much space in the truck as is going to be used by own organization. The courier company then proceeds to hire out the remaining space in the truck to other clients that will be shipping to a destination that is somewhere along the same route. Thus, any given shipment could have cargo from several different clients in a single load.
By combining the loads from more than one client, the courier company is able to make the entire shipment more profitable for them than it might be otherwise. This, in turn, allows them to make the price of shipping lower on average for clients that are shipping LTL than those that ship via other methods while still preserving their profit margin.
So, LTL is definitely a cost saving measure. However, there are other areas in which you must sacrifice somewhat in order to gain that savings. The most notable of these is the time it takes to complete a delivery. When you have to make a shipment LTL, your packages are going to be relegated to delivery in whatever order is most efficient for the courier. When you ship FTL, there is no chance of your shipment being delayed due to other shipments having to be dropped off first. That is why when some companies find that time is going to be more important than saving money, they will ship FTL even if they don't have quite enough cargo to fill an entire truck.
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