Designing Carrier Onboarding for a Multi-Sided Freight Marketplace
A logistics marketplace only works if the supply side, drivers, transport agencies, and freight brokers can register their vehicles and get verified fast. I designed the onboarding and fleet-registration system that makes that possible for CogoMate.
Client
CogoMate
Year
2023
Services
Driver, Agency, Broker & Vehicle Registration design
Role
Freelance Product Designer
The Problem
A freight marketplace is only as strong as its verified carrier supply.
CogoMate connects shippers who need to move freight with the trucks and drivers who can carry it. That only works if the "supply side" of the marketplace- individual drivers, transport agencies, and freight brokers, can join quickly, register the right vehicles, and get trusted by the system.
Before this project, carrier onboarding was one generic form that didn't distinguish between an individual driver signing up with one truck, an agency onboarding a small fleet, or a broker representing carriers they don't own. That mismatch created a drop-off during signup and messy, unverifiable data on the supply side, which is exactly the data the matching engine depends on to connect a shipper's load with the right vehicle.
My Approach
Treat each carrier type as its own user, not a variant of one form.
I started by mapping who actually shows up on the supply side of a freight marketplace, and what each of them needs to prove before they can be trusted with a load.
The Key Decision
Split by carrier type, share the vehicle layer.
Fork vs. one flow
The tempting option was one long signup form with conditional branches for driver / agency / broker less design and engineering surface area upfront. I pushed for three separate entry flows instead, because a broker registering vehicles they don't own and a driver registering their own truck are answering fundamentally different questions, and forcing them through the same steps in the same order was where the drop-off was coming from.
The flows still converge on one shared Vehicle Registration and Vehicle Selection system, so a truck registered through an agency looks and behaves the same to the matching engine as one registered by an individual driver. That kept the marketplace's underlying data consistent even though the front door is different for each carrier type.
Competitive Landscape
Most freight platforms design onboarding for one type of carrier. This one had to serve three.
CogoMate is a UAE-based logistics operation, so the comparison set here is UAE-headquartered or UAE-operating freight and trucking platforms not the Indian trucking apps referenced in an earlier draft of this page. I looked at how each handles the same problem: getting supply-side capacity onto the platform, verified, and matchable.
Broker Registration
A separate path for brokers who represent carrier capacity they don't directly own or drive.
What I Built
Each flow was designed to get a carrier from "I want to join" to "verified and ready to carry a load" with the least friction possible for that specific carrier type.
Driver Registration
Onboarding for an individual owner-driver, ending in a vehicle add step so they're marketplace ready on day one.
Agency Registration
Onboarding for transport agencies managing a small fleet, with room to add multiple vehicles and drivers under one account.
Vehicle Registration
Shared module for adding a vehicle's type, capacity, documents, and colour/condition — used by all three carrier types.
What I Learned
Building for a multi-sided marketplace means your design decisions affect data quality downstream — not just UX. The split into three carrier flows wasn't just a UX call; it made the supply-side data cleaner and more useful for the matching engine. That's the kind of system-level thinking freight logistics requires.
“I’ve worked with many designers before, but this experience was on another level. The attention to detail and thoughtful approach made the process smooth and enjoyable.”
Natalie Brooks
Marketing Manager
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