We have just published a page for every state in the country and for three hundred and one cities inside them. About half of those pages say, in the first paragraph, that we are probably not the right supplier.
That is an unusual thing to do with a marketing website and it is worth explaining.
The problem with a coverage map
Almost every supplier in this trade publishes a map of the United States with the word 'nationwide' near it. It communicates nothing, because it does not distinguish between a trailer we own that passes your door weekly and a broker we might call if you insist.
Those are wildly different propositions and the difference is entirely in the delivered price. Pallets are cheap, bulky and heavy — a full trailer of them weighs about a third of legal payload — so distance dominates the economics in a way it does not for almost any other product.
A yard forty miles away at $8.50 a unit delivered beats one three hundred miles away at $7.25, every time, and no amount of enthusiasm changes that.
So we published the tiers
Every state page carries its tier, its road distance from our gate, a drive time, and a paragraph about what actually ships there. Every city page carries the local corridors and industry mix.
| Tier | States | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Home yard | 1 | Ohio. Same-day, no appointment, depth of stock. |
| Own trailers, fixed lane | 5 | Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia. |
| Scheduled contract freight | ~16 | Full loads and program volume work; small orders do not. |
| Project and specification only | ~29 | Buy locally. We can still help with the specification. |
What it costs us
Some enquiries, presumably. Somebody in Oregon reading 'buy locally' on our Oregon page will do exactly that, and we will never know about the order we did not get.
What we gain is that the enquiries we do get are from people the arithmetic actually works for, and that nobody spends a week waiting for a quote that was never going to be competitive.
It also gives us somewhere to be useful outside our radius. Specification, engineered builds, export crating and programme design travel at any distance, because the value is in the drawing rather than in the wood.
The general principle, again
It belongs with the published grading standard, the carbon coefficients you can argue with, the landfill percentage that is not zero, and the year-end account that includes what went wrong.
All of it is one idea: say the true thing, including when the true thing is unflattering. It turns out to be a reasonable way to run a website and a considerably easier way to run a sales desk.