Very little in life is free – except this advice.
Don’t be fooled by offers and inducements from suppliers to ship your order for free. If they don’t simply hide freight costs in the value of the product you’re buying from them, there’s an even craftier trick.
The freight market, especially for LCL (less than container load) shipments is very competitive – in particular out of China and other Far East destinations. Many LCL forwarders therefore offer “FREE” freight, or at least incredibly low rates, such as $1.00 W/M – How can they do this?
It’s Meerkat “simples”; they recover the costs and make a margin by charging ridiculous and often inexplicable inflated costs at destination, leaving you faced with:
- ‘China Import Service Fees’
- ‘Currency Exchange Charges’
- ‘Agency Handling Fees’
…to name but a few.
These are in addition to the ‘usual’ Terminal Handling and port disbursement costs that you would normally expect to see. Even then these costs are not so ‘usual’ as they are inflated, again to recover costs and margin.
For realistic & visible costs for your next shipment get a quote from Seaspace here – there, that’s another thing in life that’s free!!