On Amazon Relay, the freight you get offered tomorrow depends on how you performed today. Unlike a broker load board where price is the only filter, Relay ranks carriers by performance, and that ranking directly controls access to the board's best blocks. A carrier with a strong rating sees more Drop and Hook opportunities on top-rated accounts. A carrier with a slipping rating sees fewer, and worse ones. That single mechanic is why power only dispatch on Relay requires a different discipline than general freight dispatch.

Power only removes the trailer problem, not the performance problem

The appeal of power only through Amazon Relay is straightforward: Amazon supplies the trailers, so the carrier skips the trailer payment, the maintenance, the insurance and the parking that comes with owning one. That part is simple math. What it does not remove is the operational discipline required to keep a truck consistently booked and consistently rated well.

Power only carriers who treat Relay as a passive load board tend to see inconsistent weeks: strong bookings some weeks, empty stretches in others, and a rating that drifts down without an obvious single cause. The board rewards carriers who actively work it, not carriers who wait for it.

The three numbers that actually run your rating

Amazon Relay grades carriers primarily on three things: on-time pickup, on-time delivery, and load acceptance. These are not soft metrics. They compound. A single missed pickup window does not just cost that one load, it works against the rating that determines what gets offered next week.

Protecting these numbers load by load means:

  • Building schedules with realistic transit time, including buffer for facility delays, not the tightest possible window.
  • Flagging potential delays to the account before they become missed windows, since proactive communication is handled very differently than a no-show.
  • Being selective about which loads to accept in the first place. Accepting a load that cannot realistically be delivered on time to keep the acceptance number up ends up damaging the on-time number instead. The two metrics have to be managed together, not separately.

This is where a dedicated dispatch team matters most. A driver focused on the road cannot also be tracking rating trends, facility patterns, and acceptance thresholds in real time. A dispatcher watching those numbers daily can catch a downward trend before it costs the carrier access to top-rated blocks.

Drop and Hook only works if someone is booking ahead

Drop and Hook on top-rated Relay accounts is the most efficient way to run power only: arrive, hook, go, with minimal dwell time. But it is only available to carriers who are actively booking into those accounts, and top-rated accounts are competitive. Standing decides which loads a carrier is even offered, which means a carrier with a mediocre rating is not choosing between good and bad blocks, they are simply not seeing the good ones at all.

This is a direct incentive loop: better rating produces access to better blocks, better blocks are easier to run on time, and running on time protects the rating further. Carriers who fall out of that loop tend to stay out of it unless something actively intervenes, which is usually a dispatcher rebuilding the account's standing block by block.

What happens when the Relay board goes quiet

Amazon Relay freight is not constant. Volume shifts by region, by day of week, and by season. A carrier depending entirely on the Relay board will have empty stretches during slow periods, and an empty truck earns nothing regardless of how good its rating is.

Professional power only dispatch does not stop at the Relay board. When Relay volume slows, the truck should be covered with power only freight sourced from other load boards, including DAT, J.B. Hunt and Schneider, so capacity keeps moving instead of sitting idle waiting for the board to pick back up. The goal is a truck that stays loaded regardless of which single source of freight is having a slow week.

Dispatch coverage has to match the problem, not business hours

Relay problems do not happen on a nine-to-five schedule. Detention at a facility, a facility that refuses to take the trailer, a breakdown at three in the morning: these situations require someone awake, on the phone with Amazon, resolving it in real time. A carrier without that coverage either handles it themselves while trying to also drive, or lets it sit unresolved until business hours, both of which cost time and, eventually, rating.

Three-shift, 24/7 dispatch coverage exists specifically for this reason. The goal is not availability for its own sake, it is making sure a 3 a.m. problem gets resolved at 3 a.m., before it becomes a missed window that shows up on next week's rating.

Settlements need to be as disciplined as the dispatch

A carrier running power only still needs to see, every week, exactly what happened: gross revenue, rate per mile, loaded and empty miles, Relay performance metrics, and what is already booked for the following week. Without that visibility, it is difficult to tell whether a slow week was a market issue, a rating issue, or a dispatch issue, which makes it difficult to fix.

The practical takeaway

Power only through Amazon Relay rewards carriers who treat the rating as an operational asset, not a background number. That means realistic scheduling, selective load acceptance, active booking into top-rated accounts, coverage outside the Relay board when volume slows, and dispatch support around the clock for the problems that do not wait for business hours. HRS runs Amazon Relay dispatch specifically around this structure: professional load booking, scheduling, account performance management, weekly settlements and driver coordination, so the truck stays loaded and the rating stays protected, block by block.

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