You send the same job to three carriers. One quotes high. One quotes and then goes quiet when you ask about next month. The third never replies at all.
Nothing was wrong with the freight. It is ordinary goods, on a normal road, to a real address. So the natural conclusion is that the rate was too low, and the natural response is to offer more money.
Sometimes that is right. More often it is not, because price was never the thing being decided.
A decline is an allocation decision, not a verdict
An operator that owns trucks is in the business of filling them. Everything it owns costs the same whether it moves or not, so the question it asks about any job is not "is this profitable in isolation" but "is this the best thing this vehicle and this driver could be doing that day, and can I afford to fund it until I get paid".
That gives two scarce things, and your job competes for both:
- Truck-days. A finite number of vehicle-and-driver days exist each week, and the legal day has a hard ceiling
- Working capital. Diesel is paid at the pump, the driver is paid on the payroll, tyres and repairs are on short account. Your invoice is paid later
A job can be perfectly priced and still lose on either count. That is what a quiet phone usually means. And it is good news, because both of those are things you can change without paying more.
The first question: what does the truck do next
A rate covers a movement from A to B. The vehicle is at B afterwards, and what happens there decides whether the day made money.
This is measurable, and it has been measured here. A research project on road distribution networks, funded by the National Research Council of Thailand and the Thailand Research Fund and reported in 2018, took the trucks serving the Free Zone at Suvarnabhumi Airport as its case study. Two findings are worth carrying around.
Almost every trip did one thing only. Of the sampled trips, 94.95% were single-purpose: the vehicle came in for an import or for an export, not both.
And the empty share depends heavily on vehicle size. Measuring distance run without goods against total distance run, the study found:
| Vehicle | Share of distance run empty |
|---|---|
| Four-wheel | 46.26% |
| Six-wheel | 38.45% |
| Ten-wheel | 23.27% |
Across the whole case study the empty share of distance was about 41.6%.
The pattern is the useful part, and the report's own explanation of it is the reason it holds generally. A large truck is expensive to run empty, so the operators of large trucks plan origin and destination pairs deliberately and pick up along the route. A small truck is cheap enough to run empty that nobody bothers.
Two things follow for the person booking.
Your small jobs are structurally the least attractive jobs in the country. A four-wheel delivery to somewhere with no return freight is close to a pure round trip sold as a one-way. If you keep getting refused on small vehicles, that is why, and it is not personal.
"Where does it go afterwards" is a question you can answer for the carrier. Not always, but more often than most shippers try. Do you buy anything from near your delivery point? Does a neighbouring factory on your estate ship out of the area you deliver into? Does your own supplier collect from a town two junctions past your consignee? None of this obliges you to arrange the return. Naming the possibility is enough to move your job up the list, because it converts a guess into something the carrier can go and check.
The second question: when does the money come back
This is the half that shippers never see, and it is where the largest, cheapest improvement usually sits.
Work through the cash on a single trip. The fuel left the carrier's bank account the day it was pumped. The driver was paid at the end of the month. The tyres, the tolls and the repairs were on thirty days or less. If your terms are ninety days from month-end statement, that carrier has funded your goods for something close to four months on money it borrowed or owned.
Now put that next to the fact that most transportation companies in Thailand are small. Funding four months of your freight is not a rounding error to them. It is the constraint that decides how many of your jobs they can take at once, and past a certain point it decides whether they take any.
There is a published standard for this, and most shippers have never read it
In 2021 the Trade Competition Commission issued a notification on what a fair credit term looks like when a small or medium business is the one selling the goods or the service. It was made under Section 17(3) of the Trade Competition Act B.E. 2560, it sits under the unfair trade practice provision in Section 57, and it took effect in December 2021 after a 180-day delay. Its preamble records that the 30 to 45 day standard was proposed by the National Economic and Social Development Council and the Bank of Thailand.
Road freight is a service, and the notification covers the service sector by name.
| What the notification says | The detail that matters |
|---|---|
| 45 days for the trade, manufacturing and service sectors | And 30 days where the goods are agricultural or primary processed agricultural products with a simple production process |
| A shorter term already agreed survives | The 45 days is a ceiling, not a licence to lengthen an existing 30-day arrangement |
| The clock starts on delivery of the service to the agreed quantity, type and quality standard, and on handover of correct and complete documents | Both. Documents are half of the trigger |
| A different term is allowed | But only with a reason that stands up in business, marketing or economic terms, under the terms of the contract |
| A change of term needs 60 days' notice | Changing the credit term or another contractual condition without reasonable cause, or without at least 60 days' advance notice, is listed as conduct that may be unfair |
| So does delay beyond the agreed term | Dragging payment past the credit term without reasonable cause is the first item on that same list |
| And so do bolt-on conditions | Special conditions attached to the credit that put an unnecessary burden on the other party are the third |
Who counts as an SME changed in 2022, and the change is easy to get backwards
The 2021 notification defined a small or medium business as one that manufactures with not more than 200 employees or annual revenue of not more than 500 million baht, or one that provides services, wholesales or retails with not more than 100 employees or annual revenue of not more than 300 million baht.
A second notification, dated 6 July 2022 and effective in September that year, replaced that definition. The word "or" became "and". Both tests must now be met.
That narrowed the protection, and it is the version in force. Almost every road carrier you deal with still fits it comfortably on both counts, but a large national operator with a wide fleet may not, and the burden of showing the position sits with the carrier: the same notification requires the small business to show its counterparty the documents evidencing both its employment numbers and its revenue.
Which is worth knowing in both directions. If a carrier asks you for 45 days and you want to understand whether the notification is behind the request, asking for that evidence is a normal thing to do and the rule expressly contemplates it.
Where the exposure actually sits
Read carelessly, all this sounds like a 45-day cap on freight terms. It is not, and pretending otherwise would leave you defending a position that will not hold.
Three things narrow it.
It is a guideline for judging conduct, not a price rule. Its own text allows a different term where there is a reason that can be heard in business, marketing or economic terms, set under the contract.
An offence needs damage. The Commission's general guideline on unfair trade practices, issued in December 2021, states that conduct under Section 57 must actually result in damage to the other operator, judged on the facts by economic loss: lost revenue, lost market share, lost opportunity to produce, buy or sell, higher costs, lost chances to do business elsewhere.
And it needs power. Section 57 is about unfair use of market power or superior bargaining power. The same guideline defines both. Market power is presumed from a market share of 10% or more. Superior bargaining power is defined by dependency:
- Where the trade between you accounts for 30% or more of the weaker party's total buying or selling of that good or service, or
- Where it accounts for 10% or more but less than 30%, and either the weaker party has no realistic option to switch to somebody else, or switching would cost it more than staying is worth
That is the test that decides whether your payment terms are a commercial matter or a regulatory one. If a carrier runs four trucks and three of them are on your work, you are past 30% and you are the party the provision is aimed at. If you are 5% of a large operator's revenue, you are not, whatever your terms say.
The guideline also lists, as an example of unfair use of that power, delaying payment for goods or services and refusing to pay a charge for unreasonably late payment. And among its criteria for unfairness is a condition that was never put in writing and never notified to the counterparty in advance within a reasonable time by normal trade practice. A payment condition that appears after the work is done ticks that box on its face.
What it costs if it does bite
Breach of Section 57 carries an administrative fine under Section 82 of up to 10% of revenue in the year the offence was committed, or up to one million baht if the offence falls in the business's first year of trading. That is a fine set by the Commission, not a criminal sentence handed down by a court, which is a different mechanism from the criminal penalties the Act reserves for the monopoly and cartel provisions.
Separately, Section 69 gives an operator damaged by a breach of Section 57 the right to sue for its damages, and Section 70 gives it one year from the day it knew or should have known of the cause. A carrier that decides in year three to litigate a term you imposed in year one has lost that right on the calendar alone.
None of that is a reason to panic about a 60-day term. It is a reason to know which of your carriers you are large to, and to make sure the terms you use with those carriers are written down, notified in advance and explicable.
The part you control that costs nothing
Go back to the clock. It starts on delivery and on handover of correct and complete documents.
That means the delay between the truck leaving your consignee and the signed delivery note reaching your accounts payable inbox is unpaid time, and it usually belongs to somebody in your own building. A carrier whose paperwork sits in a drawer for eleven days before it can invoice is not on your 45-day term. It is on a 56-day term, and it knows exactly which of its customers do this.
Fixing that is free. It requires no rate change, no contract renegotiation, and no approval from anybody. It is also the single most credible thing you can say to a carrier that has just turned you down.
Refusing you is almost always lawful, which is why the lever is the job itself
There is a temptation, once the word "unfair trade practice" appears, to wonder whether a carrier is allowed to refuse.
The Commission's guideline does treat refusal to deal without reasonable cause as an offence. But it sits inside the list of unfair uses of market power or superior bargaining power, and it is only reachable by a party that has one of them. A transportation company with a couple of dozen trucks, in a market of thousands of operators, has neither over a manufacturer. It can decline your work on Tuesday and take your competitor's on Wednesday, and that is simply trade.
Which puts the whole question back where it belongs. You cannot compel a yes. You can only make the job worth saying yes to.
The third question: what does your site do to the day
Shorter, because the mechanism is the same one that shows up on invoices as waiting time.
A driver's working day in land transport has a statutory ceiling, and every hour your gate takes comes out of it. A site that reliably turns a truck in forty minutes and a site that reliably takes four hours are two different products, and the second one gets refused at rates the first one gets accepted at. If a carrier has started asking for a higher rate rather than a waiting charge, that is usually the signal that your site has stopped producing two trips a day and started producing one.
Booking behaviour does the same thing more quietly. Four vehicles booked into the same nine o'clock slot guarantees three of them wait, and the cost of that lands on the carrier's week rather than on your invoice, until it lands on your rate.
The fourth question: what is the job actually asking for
Some jobs are declined because accepting them means accepting a risk nobody priced.
- A weight that only works if the vehicle runs over a legal limit
- Goods whose nature was not mentioned until the driver arrived
- A value that would change the whole liability position, disclosed after the fact
- A delivery window that cannot be met from the collection time given, which turns an ordinary job into a guaranteed failure
Carriers rarely say any of this out loud. Refusing is easier than arguing, and arguing with a customer about the physics of their own load is a poor use of a Tuesday. What you see is a decline, or a number high enough to be a decline. The fix is upstream: give the full brief before the quote rather than after the truck arrives.
What makes a job easy to say yes to
None of these cost money. Most of them are worth more than a rate increase.
| What you offer | Why it lands |
|---|---|
| A lane the carrier already runs | You are buying a gap in an existing plan rather than a whole new day |
| Any information about return freight | It changes the arithmetic on the only leg you are not paying for |
| Flexibility on one variable | Collection day, delivery window or vehicle type. Give one and the planner can fit you around the jobs that cannot move |
| Volume that is real | Accurate volumes are the first item on every list of why these relationships fail. An honest small number beats an optimistic large one, because the second gets found out and priced against you |
| A dock that releases trucks predictably | Predictable is worth more than fast. A carrier can plan around a reliable two hours; it cannot plan around forty minutes that is sometimes five hours |
| Documents back the same day | It starts the carrier's payment clock, and the clock does not start without them |
| Terms in writing, before the first job | Rate, waiting charge, payment period, and what happens if any of them change. Conditions that were never written down and never notified in advance are exactly what the unfairness criteria point at |
| Being an account worth keeping | A relationship built only on cost reduction is a standing item on the list of reasons these arrangements collapse. Carriers can see which customers they are one bad quarter away from losing |
What to change on Monday
- Find out how long your paperwork sits. Measure the days from delivery to the signed document reaching accounts payable. If it is over two, you have been quietly running a longer payment term than the one you negotiated, and fixing it costs nothing
- Count what you are worth to each carrier. Roughly, what share of that operator's revenue are you. Past 30% you are the dominant party in the relationship, and the standards in Section 57 are written about you
- Put the payment period in the quotation, not the purchase order. The credit term counts from delivery and complete documents, so agree both the number and its starting point in the same conversation as the rate
- If you are going to change a term, give 60 days. That is the notice period the notification names, and a change without it is on the list of conduct that may be unfair
- Name your return-freight possibilities, even the uncertain ones. You are not promising a backload. You are giving the planner something to check
- Give one thing away that is not money. A day of flexibility on collection is often worth more to a carrier than the percentage you were about to offer
- Ask the carrier that refused what would have made it a yes. Most will tell you, because a job they can accept next quarter is worth more to them than a polite silence
Almost every reason a carrier declines is something you can see from inside your own business: what happens after the truck leaves, how long it stands at your gate, and how long it waits to be paid. Fix the ones that cost nothing before you raise the rate, because a higher rate for a job that still does not fit the week buys a yes you will only get once.