International shipping costs don’t have to burst your budget. It’s possible to keep customers happy with affordable fast and efficient deliveries. One major way to compete effectively with local players is to cut your freight costs. These nine tips will help you find the cheapest way to ship internationally.
1. Avoid Flat-rate Charges
It’s a mistake to offer your customers flat-rate international shipping for two reasons. First, it does not offer your customers the best deal due to lack of flexibility. Second, you’ll pay the difference between the actual freight charge and the flat-rate if the shipping costs vary between delivery and timeframes, destination and package sizes.
To give your customers a choice between slower delivery and lower price versus faster delivery and higher cost, use an online freight aggregator. A number of freight providers avail aggregated delivery quotes to customers.
2. Understand What the Customer Needs
In international shipping, speed is directly proportional to cost. Never assume that speed is your customer’s priority. They may be willing to wait a few days and pay less to cut on their expenditure. Give various delivery timeframes with longer waits for your customers to choose from. Just like you, they want to make savings.
3. Maximize Your Packaging
Choose boxes that fit your item to reduce wastage of space. Airbags are lightweight packaging materials that reduce unnecessary weight. Don’t add to the size and weight of your parcel by going overboard on safety measures.
Where possible, eliminate the expensive custom box size quotes by using packing materials from your freight provider. To evade fines, adhere to import restrictions. Additionally, in case your products are diverse, cluster them in appropriate packages to avoid exposing them to physical or chemical damages.
4. Make a Packing Station
Creation of an assembly line can benefit your business. To ship your orders faster, your packing process can be broken into a few stages: construction, filling and sealing of boxes. An individual packing station is easier to manage and helps to process orders in batches for enhanced results.
It’s easy to uniformly package your orders according to shipping guidelines. This helps to keep time and gives you the power to ensure the quality of packaging materials up to standard.
5. Plan Delivery to Align with Cheap Shipping Schedules
To keep your transit costs low, work with a delivery date that allows ocean freight to avoid airfreight, which is costly. There are competitive ocean freight rates that can lower your costs when you schedule your shipment.
Late planning means less time to deliver, which might force you to use fast, costlier, shipping methods. You have a responsibility to advise your customers to leverage on these low-cost options. This will position you as a reliable partner out to ensure customers take advantage of the best and most affordable shipping rates in the market.
6. Carefully Choose International Suppliers
A fundamental piece of all international shipping freight is Ex Works Costs (EWC). This is the price at which a manufacturer, supplier or a seller avails products to a buyer. When fees and duty rates are applied, they make the costs complicated.
For instance, the Ex Works Cost from the farthest part of the world is the cheapest, but when customs duty rates and transportation costs are included, the deal is more expensive than a higher Ex Works Costs from a nearby source. Understand how EWC works to make decisions that are cheaper to execute.
7. Partner with a Forwarder
The lowest spending may not arise from the least quoted price. If your forwarder is not explaining all the costs involved in shipping but simply quotes bare bones, low price, your actual bill could be higher than you imagine.
You should have a collaborative relationship with your forwarder. Costs on your shipping depend on a proper investigation and screening of your partners.
8. Partner with a 4PL
A fourth-party logistics (4PL) is helpful where most of your business happens away from your location. From warehousing to transportation and delivery from overseas, the 4PL provider can assist at every step of your product’s journey. This reduces your transport costs and delivers goods on time.
9. Get Fulfillment Warehouses
A fulfilment warehouse in your destination state or country can handle delivery from a local station. This is an ingenious way to cut costs. As the business grows, you may need to adopt an international outlook and establish bases from where to ship your products.
This not only leads to drastic reductions in international shipping costs, but it also cuts delivery timeframes. However, this approach is only viable for companies shipping a high volume of products internationally.
It is possible to reduce shipping costs and get your business on a growth trajectory. You will, however, need to do your homework and thoughtfully consider which shipping method is appropriate for your business.