Why You Can't Find Loads on Amazon Relay (What Works)
Most of the time you can't find loads on Amazon Relay for one of three reasons: your search filters are cutting out freight that is actually bookable, you're checking the board between posting windows, or other carriers — many of them running automation — are booking the good loads within seconds of posting. Occasionally the problem is technical: an expired Relay session or a broken browser setup can make a live board look dead. This guide walks through each cause and what you can do about it today, whether or not you ever install a tool.
The real reasons the board looks empty
An empty board almost never means Amazon has no freight. It usually means the freight that posted didn't survive long enough for you to see it, or your search excluded it. Work through these in order before blaming the market.
Your filters are too tight
This is the most common cause and the easiest to fix. A narrow pickup radius, a low stop limit, a strict equipment selection, and a high minimum payout stack on top of each other, and on a thin day the combination returns nothing even when bookable loads are sitting there. Loosen one constraint at a time and re-run the search to find out which filter is doing the damage.
Work type and domicile
The board only shows loads that match the work types your account is set up for and the domicile you operate out of. A busy domicile has more postings but also more carriers watching them; a quiet domicile can genuinely have long gaps between drops. If your searches keep coming back empty at the same times every day, the issue may be where and what you're searching, not how.
You're checking between drops
New freight posts through the day and night, and it posts in bursts rather than a steady stream. Most "no loads available" results simply mean you looked between drops. The drivers who book the freight are the ones with the board open when it lands — more on timing patterns below.
You're searching the wrong slice of the board
Amazon Relay runs in 14 regions, and posting behavior differs by region, domicile, and lane. A schedule or trick that works for a driver posting on a forum from another market may tell you nothing about your board. Treat other people's patterns as hypotheses to test, not facts about your lanes.
Why the loads that do appear vanish in seconds
The Relay board is first come, first served. When a load with a decent rate posts out of a busy domicile, owner-operators are refreshing on phones, dispatchers are watching several accounts at once, and a share of carriers are running booking software that reacts the moment the load appears. In 2026 that automation is a normal part of the board, not an edge case.
Count what manual booking actually takes: the load appears, you read the payout and the stops, move the cursor, click Book, then confirm. A quick driver staring at the screen needs a few seconds — and that assumes you happened to refresh at the right moment. Automation skips most of those steps. As a concrete benchmark, the booking strategies in Relay Autobooker Cardamon react in roughly 1,000 milliseconds on the Regular setting, about 300 ms on Fast, and 100–150 ms on Super Fast.
| Who's booking | Typical reaction time |
|---|---|
| Driver refreshing by hand | Several seconds — after they happen to refresh at the right moment |
| Driver with auto-refresh and alerts | A few seconds once the alert fires |
| Auto-booking, Regular strategy | About 1,000 ms per step |
| Auto-booking, Fast strategy | About 300 ms |
| Auto-booking, Super Fast strategy | 100–150 ms |
There is a second, quieter way to lose loads: your own refresh gap. Refresh by hand every 30 seconds and a posting can appear and get booked entirely inside that window. You never see it, so the board looks like nothing dropped.
One useful corollary: the loads that sit on the board for ten minutes sit for a reason. The rate is weak, the stops are heavy, or the deadhead kills the math. If everything you see looks bad, that's evidence the good loads existed and were taken, not that they never posted.
A filter-tuning checklist you can run today
Before changing anything else, loosen the search. Work down this list, re-running the search after each change so you learn which constraint was hiding freight:
- Stretch the pickup radius. A wider circle around your location surfaces loads a short deadhead away that a tight radius hides completely.
- Allow more stops per trip. Multi-stop runs pay less per touch, but a stop limit of one or two can empty a board that has plenty of three-stop freight.
- Recheck your equipment selections. An unticked trailer type silently removes every load that needs it. Make sure the selection matches what you actually run.
- Lower the minimum payout — for now. Drop it while freight is thin so you can at least see what's moving, then raise it again when the board picks up.
- Rethink stem time. Insisting on pickups you can reach in under an hour cuts deep on a slow day. If you use automation, check that a Stem Time filter set too tight isn't skipping reachable loads.
- Take a repositioning run. A shorter, cheaper load that moves you into a busier market often beats waiting in a dead one.
If you run Premium filters on top of your Relay search, the "Skipped:" chip tells you which rule blocked a load — for example "stops > 2" or "stem < 45m" — so you can see exactly which limit to loosen instead of guessing.
Timing patterns worth knowing
Drop times vary by region, domicile, and lane, and they shift from week to week. That is why a posting schedule someone swears by in a Facebook group may not match your board at all.
The reliable approach is to measure your own board. Run an auto-refresher with audio alerts for a few days and note when the alerts cluster — those are your windows. Then cover them: watch the board yourself during those hours, or leave a machine watching for you. Loads also post overnight while you sleep, fuel, or drive, which is why many drivers leave a home desktop running with the Relay tab open around the clock.
When it's a technical problem, not a market problem
Sometimes the board isn't empty — your setup is broken. Rule these out before concluding there's no freight:
- Expired session. Relay sessions time out. A tab that has silently logged you out can keep showing a stale, empty board. Reload the page and sign back in before anything else.
- Relay changed its UI. Amazon updates the load board's layout from time to time, and an update can break any tool that reads the page. If loads are visibly on the board but your extension isn't reacting to them, update the extension first — the extension isn't finding any loads FAQ walks through the checks in order.
- A browser update disabled things. Chrome updates can turn extensions off or reset settings. Check your extensions page after every browser update; the fixes are in the stopped working after a browser update FAQ.
- The machine went to sleep. Overnight watching only works if the computer stays awake and connected. Set the power options so the device never sleeps and the internet connection is stable.
The quick test for all of these: log out, close the browser, reopen it, sign in fresh, and run one deliberately wide search. If loads appear now, the problem was technical, not the market.
Where automation honestly helps — and where it doesn't
Everything above works with no software at all: loosen filters, learn your drop windows, keep the board open during them, and react fast. Automation changes two specific things — how long you can watch, and how fast you can click.
Watching the board: the free tier is enough
Nobody presses F5 attentively for six hours. The free Smart Refresher re-runs your Relay search at an interval you set — anywhere from 10 milliseconds up to 30 seconds, with 1–5 seconds as the recommended range — and fires an audio alert when something new lands, so you can fuel up or do paperwork instead of staring at a screen. It's free forever, with no subscription and no trial clock: install the extension, open the load board, and press Start.
The disappearing-loads race: that's what Premium is for
If your problem is specifically that you see good loads and lose them, seeing them faster only half-solves it. Premium auto-booking handles the clicks at the strategy speeds in the table above, applies Max Stops and Stem Time filters so it only chases loads you'd actually take, and keeps watching overnight as long as the browser stays open. It costs $49.99 a month or $499 a year, with a 7-day free trial, so you can run it on your own board before the first charge. If reacting in a few hundred milliseconds instead of a few seconds wins you one extra decent load a month, it has paid for itself — that math is yours to check on your own lanes.
What automation won't do
No tool catches every load — you are still racing other carriers and their software, and on some loads you'll lose. Automation doesn't create freight either: if your domicile is genuinely quiet, a bot watches an empty board just as patiently as you would. It also needs a desktop that stays awake; the extension runs in Chrome on Windows and macOS and on Android via Kiwi Browser, but not on iPhone or iPad, so a phone in the cab doesn't replace a computer at home. And if you're weighing whether running any booking tool is wise at all, read the honest answer in is it safe to use an autobooker with Amazon Relay before you decide.
If you get to the point of comparing tools, the guide to choosing an Amazon Relay autobooker covers what to look for — booking speed, filters, and what happens when Relay's UI changes.