The Canadian warehousing glossary.

Written by people who use these words on a dock, not in a dictionary — each defined in the first sentence.

Models & services

Transloading: Moving freight from one conveyance to another — container to trailer, dock to dock — without a storage detour. The whole point is speed: the freight changes boxes and keeps moving.
Cross-docking: Receiving inbound freight and shipping it back out within hours, sorted to the outbound plan, with little or no storage in between. Lives and dies by the appointment.
Container destuffing: Unloading a floor-loaded shipping container — stripping, sorting, and palletizing the cartons. Priced per container by size and carton count, not by the hour.
Drayage: The short-haul move of a container from a port or rail terminal to a nearby warehouse or dock. The unglamorous first leg that everything else waits on.
Fulfillment: Pick, pack, and ship of individual orders from stored inventory — including FBA prep and returns. Scales with your season; you pay for what your orders move.
Reverse logistics: The returns flow run backwards: receive, inspect, grade, and route goods back to sellable stock, repair, or disposal — documented either way.

Container & handling

Floor-loaded: A container packed with loose cartons stacked directly on the floor, no pallets. Cheaper to ship, slower to unload — it has to be palletized on arrival.
Slip sheet: A thin sheet (fiberboard or plastic) under a load instead of a pallet, moved with a push-pull attachment. Saves pallet cost and cube; needs the right equipment.
Clamp truck: A forklift with squeeze attachments instead of forks, for handling unpalletized loads like paper rolls or appliances. One missing clamp truck can kill a deal everything else was ready for.
Honeycombing: The wasted, unusable gaps that open up in a storage block as pallets are pulled unevenly. The hidden cost of bad slotting.
Palletization: Building loose freight into stable, wrapped, labeled pallets a receiver will actually accept. Where floor-loaded chaos becomes clean pallets.
Ti-Hi: Cartons per layer (Ti) by layers per pallet (Hi) — the pattern that defines how a pallet is built and how many fit a position.
Dunnage: The packing material — airbags, blocking, foam — that keeps freight from shifting in transit. Cheap until it's missing.

Freight & delivery

Liftgate: A powered platform on the back of a truck that raises and lowers freight where there's no dock. Required for many final-mile deliveries; quoted per job.
Re-delivery: Sending a refused or missed shipment back to the receiver inside a new appointment window — usually after rework and a re-appointment.
Lumper fee: A charge for third-party labor to load or unload a trailer at a receiver. Common at grocery and retail DCs.
LTL vs FTL: Less-than-truckload shares a trailer with other shippers' freight; full-truckload is your freight alone. LTL is cheaper for small loads, FTL faster and surer for big ones.
Final mile: The last delivery leg to the receiver's door — often the most expensive and choreography-heavy part, with liftgate and driver-unload constraints.
Detention: What a carrier charges when a trailer waits beyond the free time at a dock. The clock that quietly makes a rejected load expensive.

Paperwork & compliance

BOL (Bill of Lading): The contract and receipt for a shipment — what's on it, who's shipping, who's receiving. A wrong or missing BOL bounces loads.
POD (Proof of Delivery): The signed confirmation that freight arrived and was accepted. The document that closes the loop and protects everyone.
Demurrage: What the port or carrier charges when a container sits beyond its free time at the terminal — detention's cousin, on the ocean side.
Bonded vs sufferance warehouse: A bonded warehouse stores imported goods with duties deferred under customs control; a sufferance warehouse holds them short-term pending customs release. Both require the right licence — never claimed, only verified.
Food-grade warehouse: A facility meeting the sanitation, pest-control, and handling standards for food freight. A capability we match you to and verify — not a blanket we claim.
FIFO: First-In, First-Out — rotating stock so the oldest leaves first. Essential for dated and perishable freight.

Billing & space

Pallet position: One standard pallet's worth of storage space — the unit warehousing is priced and counted in.
CHEP pallet: A rented, blue, pooled pallet to a strict standard. Many DCs accept only CHEP or grade-B — get it wrong and the load is refused.
Grade-B pallet: A repaired, reusable wooden pallet — cheaper than CHEP, accepted by many but not all receivers. Confirm the receiver's rule first.
Accessorial: Any charge beyond the base rate — handling in/out, labeling, palletizing, liftgate. On the quote up front, never a surprise after.
Overflow storage: Short-term, flexible space for volume that spikes past your own footprint — by the pallet, by the week, no lease.