If you’ve hauled for brokers on DAT or Truckstop and wondered whether Amazon’s freight program is worth the setup work, the short answer is yes — but only if you understand what you’re signing up for. Relay is a closed, first-party platform with its own rules, its own grading system, and its own mechanics. Getting those details wrong at the start costs carriers far more than the time it takes to get them right.
What Amazon Relay Actually Is
Amazon Relay is Amazon’s carrier portal for moving its own freight — out of fulfillment centers, sort facilities, delivery stations, and ports. There are no brokers involved. Amazon is the shipper, the rate-setter, and the compliance authority all at once.
That structure changes the experience in a few concrete ways. Rates on spot loads are posted as all-in figures — base rate, fuel surcharge, and tolls included — so you’re never reconciling a separate fuel bill after the fact. There’s no negotiating over the phone, no chasing an invoice through a broker’s accounts payable department. Load, rate, and payment timeline are visible before you book.
Who Can Apply
To register as a carrier on Relay, you need active FMCSA operating authority, satisfactory safety ratings, and appropriate cargo and liability insurance. Amazon verifies all of this during onboarding. The process typically takes a few business days if your documentation is in order. The most common delays come from certificates of insurance that don’t match Amazon’s required format, so review their specifications before submitting rather than after.
Once approved, you access the platform through the Relay web portal and the Relay mobile app. The app is required — not optional — because Amazon tracks driver location data in transit as part of your performance score.
How the Load Board Works
The Relay board isn’t a static list. New spot freight matches update roughly every 30 seconds, and thousands of loads sit on the national board at any given time, nearly doubling during peak season. High-rate postings in competitive lanes get booked in seconds.
Three types of freight are available on the board:
- Spot freight. Individual loads — including drop-hook, rail, and port drayage work — bookable immediately at the posted all-in price. This is where most new carriers start.
- Blocks. A shift of time rather than a specific load. Amazon assigns loads throughout the block, and carriers are typically paid in full even if their equipment isn’t needed for part of it.
- Post A Truck. The board in reverse: instead of searching for loads, you post your available equipment, location, and minimum rate per mile, and Amazon matches freight to your capacity up to two weeks ahead.
Contracts and auctions open up as your carrier grade improves.
The Performance Score — Know It From Day One
Your Relay performance grade is the most important number on the platform. It controls which loads you’re eligible to book, your priority access to new postings, and your standing for contracts and auctions. New carriers who treat it as an afterthought tend to find out why it matters at the worst possible time.
The grade is calculated on a rolling six-week window across four metrics: on-time delivery, load acceptance, in-transit app usage, and disruption-free execution. The critical detail most beginners miss: your overall score equals the lowest of those four, not their average. One underperforming metric caps your entire grade no matter how clean the other three look.
In-transit app usage is where new carriers slip most often. Drivers need to keep location services active through the full trip. It feels like a minor technical detail until it starts dragging down an otherwise solid score.
One more thing worth knowing early: your acceptance metric tracks loads you booked and then rejected, cancelled, or let expire — not loads you competed for and lost. Missing a load because another carrier booked it first costs you revenue, not standing. That distinction matters when you’re deciding how aggressively to go after postings.
What to Focus on in Your First Few Weeks
The instinct for most new Relay carriers is to maximize load count right away. That’s understandable, but the smarter priority is protecting your grade from the start. A score that slips in your first six weeks takes another full six-week window of clean performance to recover, and a low grade limits your access to the freight that makes the math work.
Practically, that means running the app on every trip without exception, booking only loads you’re confident you can execute cleanly, and building your saved search filters before you’re evaluating loads under time pressure. The board moves faster than first-time users expect. Searching it without pre-built filters is genuinely harder than it sounds when postings are disappearing while you’re still reading the rate.
Get those fundamentals right and the volume question starts solving itself: a higher grade means earlier access to better loads, which means less time chasing marginal freight. As you get comfortable with the mechanics, most carriers turn their attention to the timing problem — how to stay competitive in fast-moving lanes without keeping someone watching the board every thirty seconds. To see how carriers handle that, learn more about auto-booking and how it fits into a day-to-day dispatch operation.
Relay rewards two things above everything else: a clean grade and enough coverage to act on good loads before someone else does. Get both right and you have a freight channel that’s stable, predictable, and genuinely worth running.
