…by missing Christmas, I mean you’ve missed Indonesia Export’s Christmas deadline for production orders – if you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, the long-story-short is that if you started a production order with us now for shipping by sea, we can not guarantee you would have it in time for Christmas (you can read more details here: Production Deadline Christmas 2010).

We are Open for Business

This does not mean that everyone at Indonesia Export has downed tools and headed off to the beach for long, hot relaxing days in the sun (didn’t that sound tempting?)…

…if anything, it means we’re now busier.

From now until the end of the year, certain catalogue products are no longer available – these include teak furniture, the larger wood carvings, certain of the large stone pieces. This does not mean we’ll refuse your order; what will happen is that if you order those products, we’ll tell you we don’t have time for production but we do have time to go around Bali sourcing similar and alternative pieces from stock.

As you wish (bimsalabim, abracadabra, etcetera, etcetera.)

From this point of the year on, we treat everyone’s order as a wishlist and we limit production / preparation accordingly.

A wishlist is a list of product codes and quantities from our websites or pictures of products with quantities if you’re looking for something from outside our catalogue.

We call it a wishlist so you understand: you can’t always get what you wish for (but we’ll try our very best).

Our job is to go out and find you stock that’s ready to ship or nearly to ready; check pricing; take a photo; send you the pictures and confirm you’re ok with pricing before making the order.

For all Christmas orders, our target is to have your products arriving at your sea port (note: your port, not your door) by November 15th at the very latest. To Europe and the US we’re assuming 5 weeks container shipping from Bali (6 weeks LCL shipping).

So our last Less than Container Load orders will ship out by Friday October 1st.

Our last full container orders will ship out by October 8th.

If you’re not familiar with those shipping options, please go to our notes on shipping cost-effectively:

Shipping from Bali

All of this breaks down to the following:

• We are still open and you can still order products for Christmas.
• For items that require lengthy production lead time, we’ll go out and source alternatives in stock.
• We will do our best to see you get your products in good time but cannot guarantee you will receive your products in good time for Christmas.

If you have any questions, drop us a line.

All the best of the season,

Sean

We are planning on importing guitars from Bali to Montreal Canada, what do you recommend as method of shipping? we are planning to purchase 50 guitars at a time. air?sea?

Thank you,

Roger from Canada

The Answer:

Hi Roger,

LCL Sea Cargo, definitely. Yes you have to wait a long time and yes there is a greater risk of damage but guitars are light and bulky; you’ll get murdered on shipping charges trying to ship those by courier or air freight.

For more information, please take a look at:

http://www.indonesiaexport.com/freight.php

You may also find this article of interest:

http://www.indonesiaexport.com/wordpress/2010/07/06/shipping-handicrafts-or-furniture-lcl-from-bali-to-the-uk/

By the way, I’m assuming you’re talking about full sized guitars… if you’re talking about miniature guitars, they may still be cost-effective by courier, Indonesian post (express and standard).

Regards,

Sean

Before I go any further, let me be clear: first time buyers and importers are very important to us – in the same way that every journey begins with a single step, so every working relationship begins with one small order.

In this case, however, it simply wouldn’t be right to accept an order without warning the potential client about the downsides of her plan.

If you’re interested in importing small orders to the UK (or anywhere else) by Less than Container Load (LCL) Sea Cargo, you may find the following to be of interest.

When it comes to furniture, there are two main drawbacks to shipping less than full container loads:

1. Cost of Shipping
2. Possibility of Damage

We picked out one of our Teak Root Coffee Tables to illustrate:

TRF-0144 is a fairly representative example of our Teak Root coffee tables. It measures (height x width x depth) 48 x 90 x 75 cm and is priced at US$157.89 – total value for 5 pieces: US$789.45.

In terms of cubic volume, that gives us approximately one-third of a cubic meter (0.33 CBM) but, as you may already know, LCL Sea Cargo requires a lot of extra packing material and sturdy wood crating in order to protect the products in shipping – we estimate the volume would be around half a cubic meter (0.5 CBM) once crated so 5 pieces would work out 2.5 cubic meters.

One of the first disadvantages of LCL shipping is that your overall volume is greater than it would be in a container, air cargo or courier shipment.  In this example, if you were shipping by container, you would be able to fit 3 coffee tables per cubic meter; by LCL you can only fit 2 of the tables per cubic meter.

Now let’s talk the actual freight costs.

Here’s a recent rate (July 2010) for LCL shipping from Bali to the UK:

In this rate, you can see we’ve given the total charge for 1 cubic meter as well as a few more total volumes – including our estimate for this order – so we can all see how the rate improves as the total size of the order increases.

Always with LCL, the first cubic meter is the most expensive because while many of the charges are per cubic meter, other charges like Fumigation, Documents and so on are the same for 5 CBM as they are for 1 CBM. That said, 2.5 cubic meters still gives you a pretty expensive per cubic meter cost of US$261.93 and, remember, this rate is only to the port – there will be more charges on the UK side for clearing customs, delivery to the final address, tax and so on.

The total cost of shipping 2.5 cubic meters — US$654.83 — will probably end up being more than the total invoice value of the products at US$789.45.

Long story short: in this case, the shipping is too expensive to justify the order.

The next issue is fragility. From the moment your wood crates leave our warehouse until they arrive at your door in the UK, they will have been loaded and unloaded at least six times (between trucking and consolidation).

Each time your crates are handled, they run the risk of being damaged – that’s why we always advise customers that we cannot guarantee products will arrive in good condition.

We’re not saying LCL isn’t safe; we are saying that certain ‘fragile’ products have a higher risk attached to shipping by LCL.

We’re happy to guarantee our products in a container but simply cannot guarantee them by LCL sea cargo.

Ok, that’s basically the email I sent the client earlier today – hopefully someone out there will have found the information useful.

Regards,

Sean

Firstly and most importantly, we’ve added information to our Terms and Conditions page – key points include:

Production catalogue prices now include single face packing material.

We’ve split our terms between Production Catalogue and Agent Service – hopefully, this will help clear up any lingering confusion between these two methods of ordering with us.

Click here to read our updated Terms and Conditions.

Or you can download the updated Terms in Word or PDF formats:

We’ve updated our Services Overview page to more clearly draw lines between the 4 basic ways of working with Indonesia Export and added a summary of options page that we hope gives you the clearest possible breakdown of the strengths and weaknesses of each method.

Click here to read the Services Overview page.

Click here to read the Summary of Options page.

…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

Map (via Google)

View Indonesia Export in a larger map

Simplified Map:

We’ve made a few small changes to our structure over the past 2 days — hopefully, they’ll make your life easier.

The Indonesia Export Site Map

You can access this from our Information tab in the top navigation menu. We hope it will give you a clean and easy way to navigate through the website.

Product Index with Thumbnails

In addition to our Alphabetical Product Index, we’ve now added an Alphabetical Index with Thumbnails (first image from every category). You’ll have to navigate through page by page (using the menu at the bottom) but rather than our sometimes obscure product line titles, you’ll have a handy small image to help you identify what you’re looking for.

Product Index by Type

We’ve also broken down the different product lines into categories that may help you find similar or related product lines while you’re putting together an order. No hard or fast rules, just fairly general headings:

1. Furniture
2. Classic Bali Carvings — Decorative Artwork & Craft
3. Modern Craft — Decorative Giftware & Home Decor from Bali, Lombok & Java
4. Candles, Incense & Oils
5. Homeware, Tableware & Functional Home Decor
6. Stone, Glass, Ceramic & Terracotta
7. Stock Lists

(These links, by the way, are clickable — you can use them to go straight to the relevant section on the Product Index.)

Finally, I had removed the Logon link from the top navigation bar — sorry about that, it’s back now.

Afternoon,

Sean

…you don’t have to be a gigantic conglomerate to join in the import business. This business got its start about 16 years ago by buying some stuff in Bali and taking a few boxes to Taiwan on the airplane and then re-selling it; and…

…you don’t have to buy $50,000 worth of product or 500 pieces of one model to get started. We’ve set our minimums per product relatively low, so that new customers may start out slowly.

Because you’re buying direct, you can mark-up our price significantly to the end-buyer — and still have a very satisfied customer who feels he or she got their money’s worth.

Most people are absolutely astonished at the mark-up available (and some refuse to believe it) — but there’s no magic involved — up until just a few years ago, these prices were available only to a major buyer who had the time, money, and courage to travel out here. The Internet has given all of us a practical, efficient way to display products for sale and a superbly economical system for communicating about everything at lightening speed.

We have quite a bit of experience retailing in various countries, and in many cases, if you ask our opinion about what sells well and at what price level, we’ll be happy to share our experience with you.

We have helped quite a few people enter the import business from the ground floor and now they are good customers. Of course, we wish the same for you (and for us). Please feel free to question us in any manner you like and we’ll try to help out.

And did you know that…

…most people tend to think that buying and importing products from one country to another is quite difficult, complicated, and involves all sorts of bureaucracy. We’re happy to inform you that that’s not true. In most countries, the procedure is quite simple.

But, most importantly…

…you need someone on this end that you can trust and depend on — to handle your money correctly, to make sure you get the right order, the right quality, the right documents — to complain to if there’s a problem.

We’re in a business that requires repeat customers. Taking care of you is an automatic concern of ours. We do that very well and we’re proud of it.

[More Information about Cost-Effective Shipping]

We don’t have many Durian Wood products — we do find the wood used a little however in some of our Storyboards, The Bali Rococo Line and the pole for Balinese Umbrellas.

Strictly speaking, Durian is a plant (bears fruit) rather than a tree. The fruit is very popular here in Bali and when it’s in season, it’s sometimes hard to escape the sickly sweet smell. And, when I say it’s sickly sweet, I’m not kidding — that’s how it smells.

The Durian over here is probably Durian zibethinus but as there are a few species across the archipelago, feel free to correct me if you have a better candidate for the type used in handicrafts.

If you’re interested in learning more, please visit the Durian Palace:

http://www.durianpalace.com/

Excellent site, written by a real fan of the Durian.

Botanically speaking, durian is a member of the plant family Bombacaceae, which also includes the baobab (Adansonia digitata) of tropical Africa, malabar chestnut (Pachira aquatica), bombax (Bombax ellipticum), silk floss tree (Chorisia speciosa), and the balsa or corkwood tree (Ochroma pyramidale). Duri is a Malaysian word meaning “spike.” In the genus Durio are at least 27 or 28 species, 19 of which are native to the island of Borneo (thought to be Durio’s original center of diversity), 11 to peninsular Malaysia, and 7 to Sumatra. Of 27 species, at least seven are notable for producing edible fruit, one of which (Durio zibethinus) is cultivated commercially in huge quantities in southeast Asia. Zibethinus is derived from the Italian word zibetto, which means “civet cat,” an old name for “skunk”—very unflattering for the durian, and some durian antagonists would say, for the civet cat!

The durian is a very ancient and primitive fruit. Some botanists regard the wild ancestors of modern durians as one of the first plants to rely on animals for dispersal of its seeds, enticing them to do so with attractive, nutritious, delicious, and odiferous food surrounding the seeds within a large fruit capsule. A British botanist named E.J.H. Corner originated this “durian theory of plant evolution.” In scientific papers published starting in 1949, he argued that the enticement of animals to transport seeds in their bellies arose before all other methods of plant seed dispersal, and that primitive ancestors of D. zibethinus were the not only the earliest practitioners of that strategy but the earliest plants to evolve into woody trees. (Read David Quammen’s entertaining and informative article about E.J.H. Corner’s durian theory of plant evolution here.)