Eastern Europe Shipping Blog

For decades, steamship lines have had an unspoken pact with shippers: If you’re willing to wait many weeks to have your cargo delivered, we’ll transport it thousands of miles for you, and do it for cheap. Even with relatively affordable rates, the lines made oodles of money by piling containers – as many as 24,000 TEUs on the latest ships – onto a single vessel. 

All that changed with the pandemic as the lines cut capacity to address greatly decreased demand. As factories re-opened and as consumers starting shopping again, demand for container space soared – but vessel capacity did not. 

Companies that ship a lot of ocean freight do a pretty good job of insuring themselves against workman’s comp claims and office building fires. But most of them fail to protect the full value of their import or export cargo with marine cargo insurance, despite potential losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars per shipment.

Outsourcing to a freight forwarder for small business international shipments can save you a lot of trouble and money. A good forwarder has the expertise, and the access to capacity, to keep your shipments cost-effective and trouble-free. That’s especially important when your own company has a lean staff and doesn’t have much experience with global trade.

Freight forwarders play a crucial role in global trade. But what is freight forwarding? Even if you’ve worked with this kind of partner in the past, you might not realize all that this service includes, or how much value you gain from the relationship.

Here’s the full story.

When you need a freight forwarder to handle your overseas shipments, you face a dizzying number and variety of choices, from huge global enterprises to smaller specialty firms. How to choose a freight forwarder that matches your needs? The answer isn’t simple.

Here’s a look at what to expect as you evaluate possible partners, large and small.

If you’re moving overseas, you already have a ton on your mind—packing up your household, arranging transportation, maybe nailing down details about a job, or where you’ll live—and on and on.

So you’ll be glad to know there’s at least one thing you won’t have to do when you move: pay duties on your personal effects. At least, not if you follow the rules and present all the necessary documents.

When you need a load to arrive overseas in several days rather than several weeks, you’ll pay top dollar to send it by air. But what about less urgent cargo? If expedited shipping doesn’t fit your business model, do you simply have to accept that when your load moves by ocean, the transit will be super slow?

Not really.

If you’re looking for a trucker to move heavyweight international containers, you need to be resourceful. After all, only a fraction of carriers provide heavyweight services. When capacity gets tight, those slots fill up fast.

Filling a container is like assembling a 3D puzzle. Put the pieces together just right, and you win a prize: lower freight costs.

That’s because ocean carriers charge for transportation by the container. If you pay $3,000 to ship a 40-ft. box, that price stays the same whether you fill the box with 20 pallets of cargo or 25. The more product you fit in, the less you pay per unit.

Here’s some advice for creating a container loading plan that gives you maximum benefit for your transportation buck.

If you’ve done business mainly within the U.S., but now you’re starting to import or export, get ready to be thrown some curveballs. International freight forwarding is a whole different game.

Moving containers to or from Europe? You’ll face rules and situations that don’t come up when you ship from state to state. It’s important to work with service providers that understand all the subtleties.