Name of your website?Freight Forum
Your name?
Anthony
Your Location (city, etc)
Shanghai
Please give us a short summary of your website?
Freight Forum is a networking platform for shippers, global traders, and freight forwarders. It includes an online rate quotation system, and many other resources such as container trackingto add convenience to international traders.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
Freight Forum was created because of my own personal obsession with shipping. I started out doing exporting by myself in Shanghai, China, and along the way caught the logistics bug.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
I guess the very first website I had was when Geocities came out more than ten years now, now I have many websites.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
Its very hard to find available domain names now. Beggars can't be choosy. Actually Freight Forum was bought for around $800 and I don't regret it one bit. The name is very suitable because, well, the website is an online "forum" for freight forwarders.
What makes your website different from other, similar offerings?
Freight Forum is probably the most interactive of all the shipping websites now. There are bigger logistics websites but they don't do networking very well.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
I will never sell Freight Forum. I am 27 years old so I'm not ready to retire yet. The goal is just to continue to add functionality to the site and further facilitate shipping for all of our members.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
It's not relevant to me how much time is put into the site, as for money it has costed us almost nothing to make it because we have built it from scratch and do all the content and programming ourselves.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
Thankfully I have expert programmers as my friends so I don't have to worry about budget, whatever we feel needs to be done to the site is fully within our ability to do so.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Well we have already had 1700 people register in the two months it has been online. I would say it is not difficult to manage the website as long as you are willing to attend to it everyday.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
The programmers find IE 7 annoying to program for, other than that no big problems.
What has been your biggest challenge?
No major challenges so far.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Google adwords is quite powerful for advertising just because of their huge reach.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
It's not too bad it just needs some attendance everyday.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
The site has been online for 2 months already, and I guess I will keep it forever!
What are some of the most important parts of Freight Forum?
HS Codes, List of World Ports, Sea Port Codes and the main page which has a Sea Freight Rate Exchange
What is your website address?
Freight Forum
