On the up-and-up business in an otherwise somewhat shady industry

Jasper Blotkamp Submitted this review about Ship a Car Direct
Review made Live: 7/23/2016 5:23:00 PM
First, a disclaimer: I'm receiving a $30.00 rebate from Ship-A-Car-Direct for writing this review. Having said that, I was genuinely pleased with the job they did. I was a little unsure how to pick a dependable carrier from the many online offers available. To start, I made the rookie mistake of entering my phone number into a website query page on the promise of receiving some online quotes. What I got instead was a deluge of phone calls from aggressively buddy-buddy boiler room hucksters up and down the east coast.

I should have done some research first. As it turns out, you are not dealing with - and have no control over - the actual carrier who is going to handle your shipment. You are, instead, dealing with a broker who farms out your shipping request to an online notice board shared by all shippers. The key is to find a firm that doesn't give you the feeling it's run from a basement in Hoboken by a guy named 'Guido'. Here, I found www.transportreviews.com quite helpful, although it should be noted that their rankings are biased towards paid sponsors. Even so, it allowed me to find a broker with a track record of positive reviews. I settled on Ship-A-Car-Direct, which was about fifth in the rankings because I liked their website, which is probably not the best metric to use but whatever. We've already established that all brokers basically do the same.

From there on out it's been a pleasant and painless experience: I had a quote within minutes and a confirmed pickup date within a day or two. Their sales people are normal, nice and helpful and throughout the journey I received a number of follow-up emails. Finally and most importantly, the car arrived on time and sans damage (well, sans transport damage at least- there were a number of dents in the car that the seller had neglected to point out but that's a different story). Thank you to Gaby the sales person and of course to Peter the driver for a nice job.