The e-commerce world is ever expanding and the increase of online businesses is growing every year. As more businesses enter the market, the cost of shipping and freight has gone up.
Prices from major shipping and courier services have gone up on average 3-5% per year. Many people are wondering how much does freight shipping cost nowadays and what can customers do to fight the rising expenses?
To help answer the question, customers need to understand the facts about the process businesses go through and why they are charged the amount they are.
Since shipping costs are ever changing, businesses often set a minimum order amount in order for free shipping to be offered. As prices rise, the minimum order amount can increase. This method allows businesses to gently increase the price of shipping without making the customer feeling the increased price in shipping.
The best way to identify these hidden or unnoticeable price hikes is to keep an eye out on statements about shipping and making sure these figures don’t rise too much.
Seeing something like a minimum order quantity requirements changing is a good indicator that business needs to charge a bit more for shipping.
Surcharges and sudden price per package hikes could be accumulated during the shipment and can hit you during checkout or billed to you later. These are some reasons why international shipping can be quite difficult and costly.
If you are doing international shipping, there are often many price changes depending on the country the business ships to.
There is a fine line between charging customers too much in order to cover the additional costs and providing an affordable shipping rate but at a slow arrival date. Either way could upset the customer and deter some of the customer base.
Standard international shipping could mean a number of things for customers depending on the shipping company used.
Generally this means that packages will be cheaper to be sent to customers but are much slower to arrive and may not always include tracking which puts the package at risk.
Depending on where products are being purchased from, a tracked package could be several times more in shipping cost.
So is it worth using or asking about standard international shipping?
The answer is: it depends. If the product is small enough or has a low price point then often times the company will simply not offer standard international shipping.
Standard international shipping usually is an option for smaller businesses that rely on the quality of its product and trusts the customer won’t mind paying a bit extra to get the product.
Buying large items that require freight also shock some people when they are getting quotes. Freight costs are another expense that involves a lot of moving parts that can greatly increase the cost of an item.
It varies from standard shipping since it usually requires the item to be delivered to a dock or plane and requires special attention such as needing to be put in a shipping container.
This involves much more logistics than a simple box being delivered to someone’s house.
Most large companies have methods to reduce freight charges by having a network of warehouses that can ship locally. Amazon is a great example of this, it is able to have Prime status packages because they are locally available and can be delivered as quickly as a day in some cases.
Freight may not always be the most expensive and time consuming method of shipping. Freight costs in some cases can be considerably less than shipping multiple packages.
It is good to ask the vendor if freight is an option to explore if the item is large enough or if the quantity wanted is high.
For many years, people have used package forwarding services to get products to them. These services like Reship, let customers purchase from around the world and combined packages at a lower cost.
Using these types of services gets companies to ship to a closer location to them which means customers aren’t paying massive shipping fees and are able to consolidate a bunch of packages at one lower cost.
Therefore if you want to save money on international shipping it is best to use a package forwarding service such as Reship as it can save you a lot of money in the long run and help you get the product you want directly to your door.
Sometimes shipping options are not available in certain areas and Reship allows customers more flexibility to get the products they want from almost any online store.
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