HIGH SHIPPING COSTS?
See the harsh realities of buying small quantities from China:
The undeniable truth every business person knows is that buying products from China is astronomically cheap, and its quality fast approaching world class standards. What they may not be aware of on the other side of the coin, is the immense shipping charges incurred if you don't buy correctly. Very often, potential buyers in smallvolume.com are shocked by the shipping costs of products. Let's face it. If you are about to ship small quantities of products from China by air for faster delivery time, we're talking about shipping products halfway around the globe using either courier services like UPS, DHL, TNT, EMS or normal air postal services like CHINA POST. And yes, the rates are considerable. You can't compare cross continent shipping rates against local shipping rates when you buy from your own country. There is a huge difference!
So how to deal with disadvantage? The correct strategy really boils down to one question:
DO YOU NEED THE ITEMS URGENTLY? CAN YOU AFFORD TO WAIT 2-5 WEEKS?
1) NO, I can't afford to wait!
Sometimes, for some reason, due to seasonal changes or products with a short product lifecycle like latest innovative electronics, you are going to need your products fast to sell them to the market. That means you will need to ship your items from smallvolume.com either via courier 3-5 business days or 2-4 weeks Postal Air SAL delivery. For such situations, we advise you to select items which are high valued but most importantly, semi-light to ship. Electronic products fall favourably into this category, and perhaps clothing, accessories, or toys, etc. If air shipping costs constitute 40-80% of your entire product order amount, then that's still a decent ratio (since per pc product price is cheap) and will still allow you big profits to be made from selling your products. The additional good news is that you get to enjoy as much as 45% off published courier rates when using smallvolume.com to ship your products by courier. Don't forget POSTAL AIR SAL which takes longer, but more economical than courier and suitable for shipping items less than 30kg in total. (only available to major destinations and certain category of products). But remember, you wouldn't want to ship a carton of cheap but heavy porcelain vases using air, as shipping costs would probably cost X times more than the products itself, even with our highly discounted rates!
2) YES, I can afford to wait
Voila! You will be rewarded with bigger profits if have the ability to wait longer for your products, or have the initiative to plan early for your purchases. Buying from China is in reality, a volume game, and the biggest savings can be made if you were able to ship by an entire container by sea which can take 2 weeks to neighbouring Asia or up to 5 weeks to East Coast USA. Big buyers obsess about filling every nook and cranny in their containers with products to ensure they maximise on their container space. But for small quantity buyers, shipping by container may be a distant dream and not feasible in this current situation. However, logistics services are now so advanced that you can easily share container space with other shippers. This is the predominant way of shipping for ocean freight deliveries at smallvolume.com, also known as LCL (less than container load) or loose cargo shipping. However, this will understandably come with a higher fixed rate per cubic metre of space compared with booking an entire container. The advantage of ocean freight shipping is that they are not governed by weight, but rather by volumetric space. Therefore, you can in theory, ship crates of rocks to your destination without costing you much. You can clearly see the big difference of shipping rates when comparing ocean freight versus other forms of air shipping in our shipping calculator. With our sliding scale ocean freight rates, the more cartons you ship, the lower percentage rates you pay. The only disadvantage of ocean freight shipping is the waiting time, hence, it makes sense to order as many carton of products you need at one go.
FAQ: What if I want to make a big order, where some items are urgent and some aren't?
In this case, we'd advise you to place 2 separate orders. One order for items using a faster delivery service. And the other using slower delivery service like ocean freight.