Oversize FBA freight: what to settle before the factory releases the cargo

Oversize cargo usually announces itself late. Production has finished, the cartons are sealed, and a photo arrives showing a crate that will not sit on a standard pallet without overhanging the boards. From that moment your options are limited to what can still be arranged, and the price is whatever those options cost.

Nearly everything that makes an oversize shipment expensive is settled in the week before production ends: the carton dimensions, whether the unit can carry weight on top of it, the pallet it is fixed to, and the mode that can physically move it. None of those decisions costs much while the packaging is still being built. After the factory releases the cargo, the same changes are rework, and rework is billed.

Why oversize cargo changes the booking

Freight pricing assumes standard handling: cartons that stack, pallets that load two high, boxes one person can lift. An oversize unit breaks one of those assumptions, and a broken assumption turns into a decision made at the port or at the delivery site by someone who has never seen your product.

A unit that cannot be stacked pays for the empty space above it on every leg, and a crate that can only travel upright needs a container loaded around it instead of stacked over it. A pallet that needs a forklift needs a receiving site with one, and a fulfilment centre receives freight into an appointment slot with its own rules about how it arrives. We book those FBA appointments as part of the service, and an appointment only holds when the pallet at the gate matches what was declared to the centre.

Handling assumptions are where this shows up in a quote, and they are worth reading before you accept a price.

What to measure before you approve the packing

Ask your supplier for the packed dimensions of one unit. Product dimensions describe a catalogue photo; the packed dimensions describe what you pay for, and the gap between them is often where the surprise sits: foam corners, a retail box inside a shipping box, a wooden frame around something fragile.

• Length, width and height of the packed unit in centimetres, including any pallet or crate it is fixed to
• Gross weight per unit and per carton, weighed rather than estimated
• Whether the unit can be stacked, and how many high
• Whether it can travel on its side or has to stay upright
• Units per carton, cartons per pallet, and whether the finished pallet stays clear of overhang

Those five answers let a forwarder price the shipment and name the ones that will cost you money if they stay as they are. Estimating them is normal, and it is also the reason a quote changes once the cargo is measured at the warehouse.

Choosing the mode when the cargo is bulky

Sea freight is the default for oversize cargo because space is cheap on water. The sea transit we publish is 25 to 35 days to the United States, 28 to 40 days to the European Union and 28 to 38 days to Canada. Air freight is 7 to 10 days to the United States and 10 to 15 days to Europe. That gap is measured in weeks, and it decides which mode your stock cycle can support.

Bulky cargo is where air gets expensive fastest. Airlines bill air freight on chargeable weight, which is the greater of the weight on the scale and the weight your dimensions imply, so a light unit that takes up a lot of space is charged for the space. A supplier quoting a price per kilogram is quoting scale weight. Ask your forwarder for the chargeable weight worked out on the packed dimensions before you compare air with sea, and ask which volumetric divisor they apply, because the answer moves the number.

For palletised cargo, the LCL or FCL question turns on floor space rather than total cubic volume. Count the pallets the shipment needs, then judge how much of a shared container they would occupy. Once they would take up more than about half the container you would otherwise share, price a full container as well and compare the two totals. LCL brings handling at both ends, and awkward cargo is what makes that handling cost real money.

Rail sits between sea and air on cost and transit for Europe and Central Asia, and it is worth pricing when a sea sailing is too slow for the restock but the air rate eats the margin. A shipment that misses its selling window costs more than the difference between two freight quotes, which is why the delivery date belongs in the comparison from the first enquiry.

Building pallets the destination can accept

The pallet is the unit everyone downstream handles: the trucker, the warehouse, the fulfilment centre, the forklift driver at the last address. Build it to a standard footprint, keep the load inside the boards, and hold the height to whatever your forwarder says the carrier accepts.

Overhang is the most common fault on oversize cargo. A load that extends past the pallet looks secure once it is strapped, then a forklift cannot lift it without crushing a corner of the goods or snapping the boards. Corner protection and proper strapping cost very little at the packing stage.

Label every carton and every pallet before the cargo leaves the supplier. Labels added at the port are added by someone working from a list, and on a mixed shipment that is where cartons get separated. Our warehouse in Yiwu receives, inspects, labels, repacks and consolidates cargo from several suppliers, which is the point where a badly built pallet is still cheap to correct.

Where the extra charges appear

Oversize shipments are where a quote stops matching the invoice, because the assumptions behind the price were never written down. The charges that arrive later tend to be the same ones: re-palletising at the destination, waiting time when the receiving site cannot take the load, a second delivery attempt after a refused appointment, and storage while a new slot is found.

Ask for the assumptions as part of the quote. How many pallets does the price include? Does it assume the cargo can be stacked? Who pays if a fulfilment centre turns a pallet away at the gate? A forwarder who writes those down can be held to them, and you learn where the risk sits while the cargo is still in China.

Buyers on freight forums keep asking for a clear quote with no surprise fees, and that request is easy to meet once the shipment has been described properly. Most arguments after arrival trace back to a detail nobody put in the brief.

What to send before the factory releases the cargo

One message to the supplier, copied to your forwarder, covers the decisions that are still cheap to change:

• Packed dimensions and gross weight per unit and per carton
• Stackability, and any requirement to keep the unit upright
• Units per carton, cartons per pallet, pallet footprint and finished pallet height
• Supplier address, fulfilment centre code, and the appointment rules the centre applies
• Whether the price should be DDP, with duties and taxes included
• The date the stock has to be available, not only the date you would like it

Anything missing from that list returns as an assumption inside the quote, and assumptions are what people end up arguing about once the container has arrived.

We have moved freight out of China since 2010 from our office in Yiwu, by sea, air and rail, with DDP door-to-door delivery and FBA appointments booked in house. If you have an oversize shipment going to a fulfilment centre, send the packed dimensions and the delivery postcode to [email protected], and we will tell you which mode the numbers support and what the pallet build needs to look like.