International freight forwarders' agent selection criteria in abroad

Although the freight forwarders are the members of the supply chain, not many studies were conducted on them from the marketing perspective. This study tries to understand how the freight forwarders, who are the members of the supply chain, select their agents while they are running their business in abroad. And also try to find out the decision factors of the freight forwarders to work with an agent.Supply chain management will always be the most important topic in business and accordingly in the marketing world. The competitive advantage lies in the distribution costs of the goods / services in international trade which became the usual way of doing business with the globalization of the world economy.Because of this reason, today, a party, in the movement of goods, requires more expertise than ever. Strategy, started to slide from efficient production and communication to efficient logistics facilities. Key players became the third parties and now they are the determinants in the prices of the goods / services. Today, their relationship between each other is very important and creates more efficiency to the chain than other parties can create.To understand the forwarders? agent selection criteria, the questionnaire of the study run in 5th Annual Sino-International Freight Forwarders? Conference in Hong Kong. Most of the data were collected with one to one interviews during the conference and some of them were collected through the web based questionnaire.The results of the study showed several outputs and most of them are related with the need of a long term business relationship of the parties. The needs are changing according to the regional or economical differences of the companies in detail but most of the approaches are common in business wise. The reason of this commonality is coming from the standardized way of doing international transportation.