Everything You Need to Know

Because height drives both positions and compliance: facilities rack to beam specs, receivers cap inbound builds, and an overheight pallet can consume two positions — or bounce at the DC. The working assumption is a 48×40 base at standard height; if your builds run tall or can't stack, say so in the first message. It changes the quote far less than discovering it at the dock does.

Floor-loaded freight is packed loose in the container with no pallets, which makes unloading a crew-hours labour job instead of a forklift-minutes one — the single biggest lever on unloading cost. The de-stuff estimator reads your tier from container size, cartons, and SKUs; the glossary entry has the full picture.

They're different service tiers with very different price tags. Pallet-in/pallet-out means full pallets arrive, sit, and leave intact — you pay storage plus pallet handling. Pick-and-pack means staff open your inventory and fulfill orders carton by carton or unit by unit, priced per order and per touch. It's one of the first questions any serious quote asks because the answer can move the cost by multiples.

Because the workflow differs: a container usually involves drayage legs, chassis windows, and port or rail free-time clocks (demurrage), while a trailer is a live unload or a drop with carrier detention rules. The equipment also differs — container freight is more often floor-loaded. Answering this up front saves a full clarification round.

Ask for keep-from-freezing (no-freeze) space — heated ambient storage that holds product above zero through a GTA winter. It's a real tier between dry and refrigerated, common for beverages, broths, and concentrates, and not every dry warehouse offers it. Name the requirement explicitly; “ambient” alone won't protect it in January. See temperature-controlled space.

Yes, by matching against capability profiles that list equipment explicitly. Clamp trucks, push-pull attachments, and liftgate trucks are binary gates — a facility either has them or the job fails — and we've watched deals die over an equipment question asked too late. On the exchange it's asked at listing time, not on round nine of an email thread.

Per pallet position, per week or month, plus in/out handling on every pallet movement — and handling is the line budgets miss, because it scales with turns rather than time. Materials (pallets, wrap), document processing, and delivery legs bill as their own lines. The full anatomy is in the pallet storage cost guide.

Because the menu is the honest format. Storage, handling, materials, and processing scale differently with your program; a single flat number either hides lines you'll pay anyway or gets corrected after your freight arrives. Compare quotes line by line — the cheap headline rate with expensive handling routinely loses at a real turn rate.

Sealed, on purpose, until they're real. Every rate surface on WAREX reads from a gated store that only displays figures once we hold verified Canadian rate data — until then the estimators show your spec and the structure, never invented dollars. Most “cost calculator” pages publish stale or fabricated numbers; we'd rather show you the anatomy and earn the number.

A flat fee, disclosed on every quote, to both sides of the trade — never a spread between what the facility asks and what you pay. The fee structure publishes the day it locks; printing a number before then would make it a marketing number. That commitment is in writing on the comparison page — and it binds us.

A customs bonded warehouse stores imported goods long-term with duties deferred until they enter the Canadian market; a sufferance warehouse is the short-term holding point where freight waits for customs release. Bonded is a storage strategy, sufferance is a customs waiting room — and “bonded” is a CBSA license, not a marketing word, so ask for the license class. More in the glossary.

Documented operating discipline under the Safe Food for Canadians framework — sanitation programs, pest control, lot traceability, segregation rules — frequently with third-party audits on top. It's paperwork and process, not a clean-looking floor. Food freight on the exchange only routes to profiles that carry the certification.

Only in facilities certified for it, and the certification gates the match — hazmat freight never routes to an uncertified profile. Declare the class up front: it determines eligibility, segregation, and insurance before price even enters the conversation.

The Canadian default is a 48×40 wooden pallet at a stackable height. Oversize bases consume more cube and can price as more than one position; overheight or unstackable builds change the racking math; rental-pool (CHEP) and export (heat-treated) pallets carry their own rules. None of it is a problem — all of it belongs in the first message. The position calculator runs the math.

It's a labeled, seeded sample — and it says so in-frame, on every surface, every row. The board ships with deterministic demo data so you can judge the product honestly; live counters stay dark until real listings exist. The exchange doesn't fake fills, ever.

A human reads every spec and responds by email with real terms. We don't publish a response-time number yet because we haven't measured one we can stand behind — when we can, it prints on the confirmation screen. What we won't do is invent an SLA to win the form fill.

That's the plan the platform is built around — customers asked us “can I see my volume on hand?” for two years, and the answer is the control tower: positions, orders, exceptions in one view. Today it runs as a labeled sandbox you can try; it goes live with real operations.

Both, visibly — that's the structural difference. The exchange matches and verifies, but the counterparty is never hidden from you and the fee is never a secret spread. The old model keeps you and the facility from meeting so the middle stays opaque; we earn on the match, never the fog. See the comparison.

First hour: photograph everything (BOL both sides, worst pallet, wide shot) and get the refusal reason in writing with a name. Second: three calls in strict order — your dispatcher, the receiver's receiving office, then a crew. The full sequence is the first-4-hours guide; if it's live right now, start the rescue intake — steps one and two reach a dispatcher the moment you finish them.

Yes — that's half the job and the half everyone dreads. While the crew reworks the pallets, the desk works the receiver's calendar for the re-delivery window, because a fixed load with no appointment is still a parked trailer. Whoever owns the re-appointment owns the timeline; on a WAREX rescue, that's us, explicitly.