I'm new to importing and I wondered if this sounds normal to you...
I am about to place an order for 100 tents which are packed in to individual cardboard boxes, each box is 120cm x 29cm x 14cm in size and weighs 18kg. The supplier has suggested that most of their european customers have these tents shipped (via sea freight) in batches of about 100 and are not packed on to pallets, but shipped loose - does this not seem a little strange to you? I know if I were the freight forwarder I wouldn't accept goods that weren't packed on to pallets.
Am I wrong? Can someone tell me differently? Does anyone have experience of this?
Many thanks for your help in advance.
Regards,
Mark
Quoting from [Silaris]:
Hi,
I'm new to importing and I wondered if this sounds normal to you...
I am about to place an order for 100 tents which are packed in to individual cardboard boxes, each box is 120cm x 29cm x 14cm in size and weighs 18kg. The supplier has suggested that most of their european customers have these tents shipped (via sea freight) in batches of about 100 and are not packed on to pallets, but shipped loose - does this not seem a little strange to you? I know if I were the freight forwarder I wouldn't accept goods that weren't packed on to pallets.
Am I wrong? Can someone tell me differently? Does anyone have experience of this?
Many thanks for your help in advance.
Regards,
Mark
Mark,
It is 100% normal....... You are thinking of TRUCKING, not SEA SHIPPING!
On a container ship everything is packed in containers.. Those big-ass metal things on the trucks. It is done for specifically the reason that then everything they have to pack on the ship is the same uniform size...... Spacking onto a container NOT on a pallet is more normal than having it pallatized.
It saves money for you as well, as 100 tents in those size cartons is quite small and not even worth putting on a pallet until it reaches a port where you can palletize it at the delivery point to truck it to your place..
On another note.... your weight does NOT look right to me for a tent....... 18KG is just on 40 pounds and that is a heavy tent!
Double check those measurments with your supplier mate.... both dimensions and weight..... If the 18kg per unit is not correct (I am guessing, it could be a big tent, but then the mearurements don;t make sense)..... I would recomment\d you have him pack the tents into the singles as you quote and then have them package mutilple tents into an "outer" box up to a weight of 70 pounds (This is so you can ship Fedex/ UPS/DHL without paying penalites for "overweight"..... Check that weight with ALL THREE and also with British Mail....... THAT is your maximum "outer" weight..... even if it is 2 per outer it saves you buying more packaging!
If all that was too confusing you can contact me on TM and we can go thru it.
Many thanks for your reply. Yeah the tents do weight 18KG each and do fit in to the box mentioned in my previous post. The tents are non-standard - basically not the light weight tents you would buy for camping.
I understand that the tents will be packed in to a container and shipped to my destination port. The thing that worries me is that they will be packed with goods for other importers and I just imagine my 100 loose tents getting mixed up with other items within the container.... or is this just me being paranoid?
Thanks,
Mark
Hi, Silaris.
don't worry about that. I worked in a freight forwarder in China, we have operated many LCL shipment. It's very normal to ship by LCL, the consolidator will issue one HB/L to each importer, and they shows marks on them, they can recognize your goods easily by the marks.
Roger
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