Market metrics are a set of tools to help you position your prices against the market. They are global settings that apply to all displayed market data — including both ocean and air freight. By setting the appropriate market metrics, you can narrow down the scope of the freight market to only those segments that matter to your business.

The market metrics options can be found in the top-right corner of the Xeneta app.

Xeneta uses the following market metrics to set a benchmark for your data:

1. Contract duration (Ocean Freight)
2. Market position (Ocean and Air Freight)
3. Service level (Air Freight)

Market Metrics for Ocean Freight

Market Metrics for Air Freight

Contract Duration

The contract duration metric allows you to compare your rates against rates defined by short-term or long-term contracts. Contracts are classified as short term if they last shorter than a month, and long term if they last longer than a month.

Additionally, long-term contracts can be further filtered by the age of the contract — that is, how long ago the contract began — by using the contracted within options.

Market Position

The market position metric allows you to compare your rates to the average market rate, as well as the market low — the lowest prices being paid by other market participants — and the market high — the highest prices being paid by other market participants.

Setting your market position is useful because it can remove market rates that might not be relevant to your analysis. For instance, if you find that your rates tend to be below the market average, it could be useful to set the market position to Market Low, so that your rates are compared against the rates of others paying below the average.

For more information on how the market position is calculated, see the following article.

Service Levels

Due to the non-standardized nature of air freight, similar shipments may differ from one another based on a number of factors including transit time, clearance speed, and the number of stops permitted during transit.

To make air freight shipping rates comparable, Xeneta categorizes your air rates into service levels — low, middle, and high — based on a number of factors. You can read more about how Xeneta categorizes air freight delivery options into service levels here.

The service levels metric allows you to compare your freight against other freight with similar delivery speeds, clearance speeds, and other such delivery factors.

For example, if you're concerned with receiving air freight as soon as possible, it would not make sense to compare your rates to low- or mid-tier rates, which tend to be cheaper at the cost of delivery speed. By setting your service levels metric to Upper-tier, you'll be able to compare your freight rates against the freight rates of others paying a premium for delivery speed.