How to pick an appropriate shipping method from China to your Amazon
Shipping is the bridge bewtween sellers and buyers. International shipping plays an important role in international trade, especially for the amazon seller. One who could properly handle international carriage will get an edge over the peers.
No matter factory or buyer can lead to a series of unnecessary loss due to the lack of logistic knowledge. Such as selling out of stock by no managing the supply chain properly, over estimate the shipping cost by no considering the dimension weight, leading a loss by using wrong shipping methods.
In order to make a proper shipping method, we have to learn the difference in each way.
- International express service like DHL, UPS Fedex are adoptable for those product with small weight and dimension, based on the door to door shipping cost, sometimes 100kg can be cheaper than sea shipping. Buyer can also use they express account to arrange express service directly from China, but if they lack bulk shipping to support, they usually not able to get a discount from express company. For the reason that freight forwarder have stable bulk shipment, they can usually get a low discount price from express company.
- Air freight actually is different from express, air freight is port to port service while express is door to door. Air rate is cheaper than express rate but as air freight is port to port, we also need to take the clearance and pick up charge from Airport into our consideration .
However, the charge mode of air freight is different from express, when the dimension weight is large than its actual weight, if ship by express service ,it would be 5000 cm³/kg = 200 kg/m³while air 6000 cm³/kg = 166.667 kg/m³. For example, 20 cartons with 50*50*50 cm dimension, if ship by express service, it would be 50*50*50*20/5000=500KG, if ship by air, it would be 50*50*50*20/6000=416.66 kg. In conclusion, if your product is large in volume, choosing air freight can be more economical than express as the chargeable weight is less than express.
- Traditional sea shipping it not always the cheapest one as there are lots of min charge, like port charge, clearance fee etc, generally speaking, if cargo up to 3cbm, sea freight can be more economical.
Other shipping method
- Air express service, consolidated different product and do clearance together, shipping cost would be very low, unstable transit time, can be 12-30 days, easy lose packages.
- Sea express service, same like air express service, hard to manage the transit time.
Sea freight consist of LCL/Less container load and FCL/full container load, US Amazon for instance, Amazon warehouse accept pallets under LTL ship, if palletized in China, the volume would become more larger while shipping cost will increase accordingly. Amazon has high requirements on its pallet, sometimes China pallet may no meet the requirements and get refused by amazon, but products of course get better protected while palletized.
Under FCL, if palletized in China, it can’t not make full use of the container and waste lots of shipping space. Or if put pallet in US side, it need to pick up the goods into nearest warehouse, unload, re palletized, wrap, label, make amazon appointment and deliver to amazon warehouse which can cost lots of labor fee.
Yes, we could also consider floor loading to amazon (ship to amazon without palletized), it could save you a lot but it’s too risky as it has high chance to be refused by amazon and leads a more cost.
So After lots of practical case, if product up to 40GP/HQ, it would be more reasonable to use FCL, otherwise LCL would be more economical.
