Easy4Pro — market intelligence
The aftermath
What happens to freight once the shock has passed — and why "no solution" is the number that tells you the market has actually settled.
Easy4Pro — market intelligence
What happens to freight once the shock has passed — and why "no solution" is the number that tells you the market has actually settled.
Make no mistake about the scale of it: the initial disruption around the Mobility Package's entry into force was a genuine market shock, not a mild disturbance. Offers per shipment fell, carriers willing to bid disappeared, and price moved up quickly as compliant capacity tightened across the board. That part of the story is well documented. What matters more is what came after — and the market itself did not find a new normal for everyone. It found one for Easy4Pro users, specifically, because the combination of consulting and tool gave them a way to adapt that the rest of the market didn't have.
This is where "no solution" shipments become the more honest indicator than price alone. A price spike tells you the market is expensive. A rise in shipments left without a workable carrier solution tells you the market is broken — that demand and available capacity are no longer meeting at any price shippers and carriers are willing to accept. Watching that rate rise, peak, and recede is the clearest read on whether a regulatory shock is a temporary disturbance or a structural reset.
Price answers "how much." No-solution answers "whether at all." The aftermath is the story of that second question closing.
Across the disruptions we've tracked, the path back to stability for Easy4Pro users has followed a consistent, recognizable arc — one the wider market, left to itself, doesn't follow.
Carrier availability drops abruptly as new compliance requirements take hold. Offers per shipment fall, no-solution rates climb quickly, and the market has not yet re-priced to reflect the new cost of compliant capacity.
No-solution rates ease first — not on their own, but because consulting-led sourcing actively configures the right mix of rate cards, spot, and new carriers, especially on the most complicated lanes, rather than waiting for the market to sort itself out. That extra capacity shows up as more offers per shipment, and more offers is what starts pulling price back down. Not to pre-shock levels, but low enough that cost avoidance climbs to its highest point in the whole window.
For Easy4Pro users, no-solution rates return to historical levels as consulting keeps refining the rate card, spot, and new-carrier mix on the lanes that still need it. Price settles higher than before the shock, but the shipments get solved — which is not what happens across the market at large.
The signature of a genuine re-stabilisation is not that no-solution shipments disappear — some baseline level of unmatched demand is normal in any freight market. The signature is that the elevated rate observed during the shock window recedes back toward that historical baseline, and stays there, rather than settling at a new, permanently higher plateau. Among shippers running on Easy4Pro, that's exactly what happened: no-solution rates returned to historical levels, because the platform and the consulting configuration behind it let them adapt quickly instead of waiting the shock out.
The no-solution rate falls back to its historical range over subsequent weeks. Carrier participation broadens again as the right mix of rate cards, spot, and new carriers gets configured lane by lane. Cost avoidance doesn't just recover — it reaches its highest levels of the whole period, because the configuration work is what re-priced the market in the shipper's favour, not the market alone.
No-solution rates plateau at an elevated level rather than receding — a sign the regulation has removed capacity permanently rather than just repricing it, and that nothing is actively being done to reconfigure sourcing on the lanes that need it most.
A shipper reading only the price line might conclude the market has stabilised as soon as costs plateau. But price can plateau at an elevated, still-difficult level. Tracking no-solution rates alongside price is what tells a shipper whether they're looking at a market that has cleared, or one that has simply stopped getting worse — and price here is higher than before the shock, by design of the market, not a shortfall of the response to it.
The re-stabilisation described above didn't just happen to the market. It was driven, deliberately, by pairing two things: consulting services that go and find capacity rather than wait for it, and a hybrid sourcing model — rate cards and spot combined — built to put that capacity into real competition with itself.
Consulting closes the no-solution gap directly, by locating carriers a shipper's own network wouldn't otherwise reach. Hybrid sourcing is what turns that extra capacity into pricing pressure: rate cards anchor a baseline, spot brings in the carriers willing to compete below it, and the two together create more genuine price competition than either produces alone. That combination is what pulls price back down without waiting for the whole market to loosen up on its own — and it's why cost avoidance in this window is not just recovering, it's higher than it has ever been.
What could have been a nightmare scenario becomes a minor bump in the rear-view mirror. Without this setup, prices would be rocketing, and no-solution shipments would be rocketing with them.
No-solution shipments get actively resolved, hybrid sourcing keeps rate cards honest against spot on every lane, and cost avoidance reaches a new high precisely when the market is under the most pressure. No-solution comes back down to historical levels. Price settles above where it was before the shock — but far below where the shock alone would have taken it.
The same shock plays out with none of these levers available. No-solution shipments sit unresolved, there's no structured competition between contracted and spot capacity, and the price the market set during the shock becomes the price paid — with nothing pulling it back down and no relief on the shipments that still have no solution.
Five markers, read together, trace the arc from shock to re-stabilisation. Spending, price per km, and shipment volume are shown as indices against week 23 rather than absolute figures; no-solution is shown as the rate of quotations left unresolved, not the raw count.
The clearest read on the shock itself: the rate more than triples at the peak, then recedes toward its historical range as consulting-led sourcing takes hold.
Carrier competition drops sharply from W26 as compliant capacity thins out, then recovers.
Price catches up to scarcity as the shock takes hold, then eases back down without returning to baseline.
The market re-prices in step with average spending.
Volume rises ahead of the shock, softens through it, then settles slightly below where it started.