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Mutual commitment between the customer and line ‘ensures that the vicious cycle of overbookings is addressed’, box carrier claims.

MAERSK has launched an online spot booking product with a cargo loading guarantee at a fixed price upfront.

The company says that Maersk Spot will help break “the vicious cycle of overbookings” within container shipping.

With the launch of the “fully digitally enabled”, Maersk said it was taking “further steps towards simplifying the supply chains of its customers by addressing some of the fundamental inefficiencies that exist across the industry”.

Maersk Spot is available on all trades, except in and out of the US, as a beta site, but the product will be implemented on maersk.com at the beginning of August, Maersk said.

“It is not uncommon to see overbookings to the tune of 30%, and often this leads to rolling of the customers’ cargoes since there is overbooking to compensate for the high downfall,” said Silvia Ding, the company's global head of ocean products. “This creates a lot of uncertainty for our customers.”

Maersk Spot will allow it to “provide full visibility of the price and terms that will ensure cargoes get on board, ultimately allowing customers to move their cargo in a much simpler and more reliable way”, she added.

The global container line said the new product means that “customers can search and get competitive rates online 24/7”.

“Today’s offline process can be up to 13 individual steps, often involving a lot of communication and paperwork from rate sheets to terms and conditions and surcharges,” Ms Ding added. “With Maersk Spot, this cumbersome process is reduced to five simple and integrated steps — all online.”

Ramco Cements, a cement manufacturing company in India, is already using the service. The company sends around 120-200 containers from Kattupalli port to Colombo every week.

“We are quite proactive about our bookings but there were still cases where our shipments were not loaded because of capacity issues which resulted in the loss of trust with some of our customers,” said Ramakrishnan Vivekanandan, the company’s general marketing manager . “We no longer have the uncertainty of not knowing if we can actually provide our customers with their shipments.”