Shipping Less than a Container Load (LCL) to Canada… or anywhere else.

Mar 25, 2010 by Sean

I recently had a letter from James – a first-time, potential buyer regarding ordering and shipping less than a container load of products from Bali to Canada:

…and have a couple questions. I am wondering do you have size restrictions for product going in a less then container load. I would like some giraffes and and elephants, but would like to now the max size I can put in less then container load shipment ?.  I am unsure of how this shipping by sea works ?

Hi James,

We do have restrictions (more like guidelines really) on LCL shipments.

Things you need to know include:

LCL transit time to Canada can be as much as six weeks (that’s six weeks transit from our warehouse in Bali to your closest port).

With LCL, you’re being charged by the cubic meter so the smaller and more valuable the item, the more value for money you get from your shipment. Let’s say you can get 4 giraffes to a cubic meter, that will cost you the same amount to ship as 100 masks – makes the giraffes a very expensive shipment but makes the masks cost-effective and therefore profitable. By the way, those aren’t real numbers – you’ll get more masks and more giraffes per cubic meter – just making a point.

Next, for LCL, everything is usually packed inside sturdy wood crates. You need to know that wood packaging materials are required by Canadian customs to be kiln-dried, government approved agency inspected and certified over here in Indonesia and fumigated to a particular standard (ISPM#15). That’s expensive.

We have had one customer in Canada avoid the wood crate charges by shipping with Scanwell.  This freight company is represented here (in Surabaya, Java) and in Canada.

Scanwell didn’t want to ship our customers products without wood crates but the customer (and we) insisted and they did it.

The upside is that you avoid ISMP#15 fumigation charges and hassle. The container, by the way, still needs to be fumigated but only the standard (cheaper) fumigation.

The downside is that there is more risk of damage and loss to your goods.

Next, many products are not suitable for LCL simply because they’re fragile. I’ll explain. With LCL, your products are packed up here in Bali and delivered by truck and ferry to the international port of Surabaya (Bali only has a local port). They’re unloaded and then loaded into an outbound container. That container will not go directly to Canada but will probably be unloaded in Singapore or Korea or Taiwan then reloaded into another container bound for your port. The important part is that your shipment is handled a number of times and in Indonesia, most of that handling is done without forklift trucks or machinery – meaning the boxes or crates are pulled, dropped, bounced, shoved… you get the idea.

Certain products just won’t make it: terracotta, anything with glass, furniture items, and so on.

That doesn’t mean we say you cannot order and ship those items – it does mean we strongly recommend you don’t order them for LCL shipping and, more importantly, we cannot guarantee the safety of those items – in other words, if it arrives smashed up our usual guarantee will not stand. That said, of course, we would quality control and pack the shipment as best as we possibly can.

Which leads me to the final point: with LCL you’re being charged by the cubic meter but, to avoid damage, that generally means we have to pack more heavily than we would for an air or full container shipment – if you do include wood crates, it can mean that up to 40% of every cubic meter you’re paying for is just packing material rather than the products themselves.

Hopefully, at this point, I haven’t made you cross-eyed with information overload.

Here’s what I suggest: send us a ‘wish list’ of products you like. We’ll turn that into a draft invoice with a running estimate of volume. We’ll get back to you with our opinion (which you can always choose to ignore) as to what you should not ship by LCL. We’ll also get you a quote from our usual shipper and make contact with Scanwell to see if they can reproduce the no crate shipping deal we had with our last customer.

Morning,

Sean