Commentary

By Eric Johnson

Customers are turning to data sources that can turbocharge automation.

The demise of SeaRates, the DP World-owned ocean freight technology platform, is indicative of shippers and large forwarders increasingly moving away from the low-cost end of the market in favor of visibility data that can be plugged directly into projects to automate global freight movement.

Those customers are turning to data sources that can turbocharge their automation ambitions, something SeaRates could not provide.

According to a note on the product’ s website, DP World will discontinue SeaRates in the coming weeks. The end of SeaRates is notable because it seems to represent a change in course for DP World, which at one point envisioned SeaRates, acquired in 2020, as its digital storefront for quoting, booking and tracking ocean freight.

Founded in 2005, SeaRates’ model was somewhere in between the open freight marketplace of Freightos and the digitally oriented forwarding approach of Flexport, COO Stefan Rogovskiy told the Journal of Commerce.

Rogovskiy, who acknowledged the platform is being phased out, said SeaRates had become the largest provider of container tracking data, largely because it served thousands of small forwarders with port-to-port, air and parcel data.

The affordability of SeaRates drove that volume of usage, but that price point also positioned its tracking data as the low-cost option in a highly competitive visibility market where other providers are focusing on the message that they deliver clean, usable and contextualized data in an increasingly messy world.

Data buyers in the container shipping world are leaning on information they can use to power more than just track-and-trace monitoring. In an environment awash in optimism around what artificial intelligence( AI) can do to solve pesky, systemic problems in global logistics, buying the lowest-cost data isn’ t necessarily the best path.

“ There’ s the hidden cost of container tracking,” said Kevin Valsi, CEO of container visibility provider OpenTrack, which nominally competed with SeaRoutes among a dozen other vendors.“ If the data doesn’ t meet the autonomy threshold, meaning you can’ t automate off that data, then the low-cost leader ends up being the most expensive because you then need an ops team to double check everything.”

That evolution of buying behavior cuts against the long-held notion that visibility data was a commoditized market that would herald an inevitable race to the bottom. In past cycles, new visibility providers with increasingly better data and marketing messages that moved that data from the“ nice-to-have” to the“ need-to-have” category eventually found extracting premium prices harder over time.

Companies like INTTRA and Infor Nexus saw their visibility offerings either embedded within broader transportation management products or acquired into companies that provided supply chain and freight management products.

More recently, the same phenomenon has played out with project44, FourKites and Shippeo, all visibility providers that have either developed a transportation management system to better use their visibility data or linked it to associated offerings.

The fact that virtually every visibility provider born since the early 2010s is either still in business or was acquired seemed to place heavy cost pressure on the market.

But the age of AI has shifted the discussion, and the value placed on visibility data. If an AI agent doing discrete tasks, such as managing various parts of an in-transit shipment, is to do its job effectively, it needs data that has all the context of that shipment. If there are associated data sets, such as inland moves, that provide that context, the automation the AI agent is supposed to enable breaks down.

Rogovskiy said SeaRoutes was well-connected with shipping lines and had comprehensive data on air and parcel, but it lacked the robustness of other platforms for inland modes like trucking and rail, especially in North America.

The question around SeaRates’ closure is whether a market for that data, at that price point, still exists. If thousands of small forwarders – Rogovskiy said the average SeaRates customer moved five containers a month – still need data, who do they turn to if the rest of the market is focusing on being premium providers of data to feed into sophisticated logistics management and planning applications?

Other visibility providers have been eager to test whether SeaRates’ customers are a good fit for their business, with many offering introductory discounts to those customers.

But the reality, several vendors told the Journal of Commerce, is that those SeaRates users don’ t fit their ideal customer profile. That’ s either because they are working with larger forwarders with specific data requirements or because they are targeting shippers directly. Or, because they see customers across both those segments as more partnership-based and less transactional.

email: eric. johnson @ spglobal. com

54 Journal of Commerce | September 7, 2026 www. joc. com