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. 

Cargo that doesn’t fit in a container costs more to ship than cargo that does. It's also way more complicated to ship out of gauge cargo via ocean. A lot more rules to be followed to ensure safety and security, door to door. All that complexity creates time and headaches for shipping departments.  

To ease the burden on your staff, and your wallet, we put together a detailed online eBook that covers just about every aspect of shipping out of gauge cargo globally.  Link to that eBook here.  

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.

Hazmat cargo.

The phrase can conjure images of skull & crossbones stickers on steel drums with contents that can melt through just about anything. But when it comes to shipping, even some common items in your house are considered hazmat – like paint, perfume, deodorant, glue, and glass cleaners.

Freight marketplaces for ocean freight are gaining in popularity. But does this online booking option really align with your needs as a shipper? Here’s an overview of things to consider when examining the freight forwarder vs freight marketplace choice.

Sometimes the volume of your ocean shipment easily makes up a full containerload (FCL). Sometimes the shipment is small enough to make less-than-containerload (LCL) service the best option. But the choice between FCL vs LCL shipping isn’t always clear cut. What to do then?

Here are some factors to keep in mind as you decide which service to use.

Nine of the top 20 countries that sell goods into Canada are in Europe, according to the United Nations COMTRADE database on international trade. If you want to learn how to make this trade route more profitable through efficient global transportation, here’s a quick guide.

An alarming number of shippers these days are desperately searching for someone to rescue their containers. The problem? Companies contract with steamship lines for door-to-door cargo shipping, and then the lines provide terrible service. Sometimes containers even get stranded at ports or rail terminals for weeks.

How can you avoid those problems? Let’s take a look.

Port congestion, tight capacity, container shortages and other woes, all linked to pandemic-induced disruptions, have shippers tearing their hair out over ocean shipping transit time.

No one expects the global transportation pipeline to get back to normal anytime soon. But by deploying a few smart techniques you could, in some cases, shave some time off your ocean transit.

Container shipping rates were bad enough at the start of 2021, but today they’re even steeper. As of May, transporting a container from Europe to the US costs $2,000 to $3,000 more than it did in January.

In the current market, there’s no room to negotiate with ocean carriers. But with the right strategy, it’s still possible to reduce your shipping costs.