This article explains the various motorcycle transport services available.
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If you are considering shipping a motorcycle it is a good idea to spend some time researching the various motorcycle transport services that are available in the motorcycle shipping industry.
There are a number of different methods that are used to transport motorcycles. The most common method is the roll-on roll-off method. What that means is the shipper literally rolls the bike onto their trailer, secures it with soft ties and rolls it off the trailer at delivery. The vast majority of motorcycle transporters use this method when shipping motorcycles.
Another fairly common method that shippers use to transport motorcycles is the pallet option. A number of motorcycle shippers mount the bike on a wooden or metal pallet while the bike is in transit. The shippers that use wooden pallets will have a pallet jack on their truck that they use to move the palletized bike around while loading and unloading. The shippers who use metal pallets have casters on the pallet so the palletized bike can be rolled around attached to the pallet. Both of these methods are very safe methods of transporting motorcycles. The pallet option usually costs a little more than the roll-on-roll-off option primarily because the pallet takes up more space in the shippers trailer and as a result they cannot fit as many bikes on a truck as the roll-on roll-off shippers can.
A limited number of shippers transport motorcycles in wooden or metal crates as well. These shippers usually ship other types of freight in addition to motorcycles and they require you to crate the bike yourself and possibly drop the crated bike off at their loading dock and pick it up at their loading dock. As such, the crate option is less convenient for the customer because there is more work involved for the customer in order to transport the bike in a crate. This has been a very safe method to ship motorcycles but it is the most labor-intensive method and sometimes costs more than the roll-on roll-off service and/or the pallet service.
In addition to these various shipping methods, we do offer a payment and title transfer service that many customers take advantage of. If you are buying or selling a bike out of state you may want to consider using our payment and title transfer service. With this service, the buyer mails us the payment check for the purchase of the bike and the seller mail us the title up-front. We scan the check and the title and email copies of each document to both parties. When the motorcycle is picked up by the transporter we mail the check to the seller and when the seller receives the check we mail the title to the buyer. This has proven to be a very safe method to handle the transaction between the buyer and the seller. We want to clarify that we are not doing anything legal with the check or title, we are acting somewhat like a courier moving documents from one party to another when certain triggers happen in the shipping process.