One of the best ways to save money on international shipping is to load containers with as much weight as the law allows. After you load them, of course, you need to get that heavy shipment to the port, and then from the destination port to the receiver.
Those over-the-road trips can be tricky. It takes a special kind of service provider – ideally a heavy haul freight broker – to move a heavy shipment safely, legally and economically.
A major rail line in the New York Metro area was able to source the steel rail it needed in the UK. The company arranged ocean transport to the Port of NY/NJ, but transporting the steel rail from New Jersey to Connecticut was going to be a challenge since some of the rail sections were 132 feet long.
Many global shippers of dense, heavy freight fail to maximize container payloads and, as a result, inflate heavy freight shipping costs 20% or more. But by working with the right landside partners, heavy freight shippers can maximize container weight on the water to reduce the total number of container shipments annually – and still deliver door-to-door, without transloading.
Sometimes you have to load a truck with extra-heavy freight—for example, to transport large machinery to an ocean port. Sometimes it just pays to ship heavy—for instance, to save money on ocean transportation by fitting all the weight you can into a container.
Either way, it’s important to understand heavy haul freight rates and know what it takes to transport heavy freight over the road.
For global shippers of oversized (e.g., machinery, construction equipment) and heavy freight (e.g., stone, tile, metal, forgings, castings and even bottled water), keeping freight costs low requires added expertise and, sometimes, a little creativity. Here are 15 ideas to reduce costs for oversized and heavy freight.
When you ship oversize freight, the length, height and/or width of the load dictate that you’ll need special permits for truck transportation. But often, of course, an oversize load is a heavy load as well. That’s why it’s important to understand the truck weight limits that apply to oversize shipments.
If you had to move a huge piece of machinery overseas, would you know what to do? Here’s how one shipper, with no prior experience, solved its oversize cargo transportation puzzle with just one phone call.
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.
You wouldn’t put on flip-flops to climb a mountain or go running with size-12 sneakers on your size-10 feet. Ocean containers are a bit like shoes: you need the right kind, and the right size, for your specific purpose.
As of June 2019, the spot rate for shipping ocean cargo from Europe to North America was $2,044 per 40-foot equivalent unit (FEU). That’s 42 percent higher than the rate one year ago. Even on less expensive lanes, you certainly don’t want to pay more for shipping than you need to.
So how can you keep ocean freight costs as low as possible?
