How To Avoid OVERPAYING for Shipping on Alibaba

How many times have you gone to an Alibaba listing page? You type in the number of units you want and then look at the

shipping

on the right side that was automatically quoted and really ask yourself: Do you know what the best deal is for you? You can even click change and you will be able to see what would be the sea freight as well as express or air freight, so for air freight you know for this example it is just 254 dollars or not, today I want to share with you how you can Double check the

shipping

cost you see here on Alibaba or the shipping cost you receive from your supplier once the actual bidding process begins.

I am going to share with you two different ways, one using DHL and another using Alibaba logistics platform. and you can use this to purchase your shipping separately from this whole process or you can go ahead and use it as a reference tool to verify that you're not spending too much and that the shipping charges are okay, so I'm going to get Now, I think I always it's better that we cover an example when I go through a couple of scenarios so you can see how you know I do this for my own business, the product for this scenario that we're going to use.

What we look at today is the soda can organizer for your refrigerator. This is actually the product of the month for March, so be sure to watch that video right now if you haven't already. There's a lot of good stuff in that video, so let's move on. Put 60 units here because that's what we want to buy and we got a final quote of $143 with about over a hundred dollars just for shipping and that's C Freight, so what can we do here? The first method we will use DHL to get a quote. Now I'm going to go to DHL here and put this link in the description so you can get direct access to it, but first thing I'm asking you if I'm shipping as a private person or as a company.

We'll just say we're doing this as a private person. It doesn't really change much, we will ship from China and then you will ask. you indicate the city or the zip code, this is optional, but if you want to get the most accurate price, make sure you enter at least one of these, so we will come back here to find the zip code or um Province State, whatever it is, you can click on the company profile in the listing and then it says country region right here so we can continue, we can copy and paste it into the city.

The other option is to copy and paste this and search. the zip code so you can see a common zip code is five one zero zero zero zero, let's just type it in and you will know if you have time and you can contact the supplier to get this information or go to on their supplier page or website, you can find it much faster, but it's just an efficient way to do it. Alright, next hour is the second hour, where are we sending this? For this example, let's say we're going to ship this to Los Angeles in California, so I'm going to type in Los Angeles and then I already know the zip code and it actually showed up here, okay, so we'll say this is a residential address, let's say you live here, you receive your products domestically and then you will ship them to Amazon below we are going to describe our shipping now this is the actual box that all the products come in together this is not a single unit package this is all in one the first thing we want Find is the total weight of that individual packaging unit.

There are two places you want to look here on the Alibaba listing page. The first is the packaging and delivery of the product you want to buy. This may be a little different. Depends. to the supplier how much information do you want to include here for the first three line items here units are sold as single units so this is a single unit package and this is the weight of a single unit this is not what we are looking for now If I go down to the package type, if you read this information, we get information here, but it doesn't tell us everything we need, it tells us that there are 60 pieces per box or you know the largest shipping box for this scenario.

I'm buying 60 pieces just to keep things simple, but you may have to do a little math if you know this says 30 pieces per box and we're ordering 60 pieces, so we'll probably need two boxes. The next area to look at is to scroll down near the bottom, about three quarters of the way down there should be a specifications section. Now here is the information that we need again 60 pieces per box and then you have the size of the box in centimeters so this is the actual shipping box that Put all your 60 pieces in this is what you will receive before you unload all those units and right below that is the total weight, so we have all the information we need here with our box size and the total product weight for that entire package, so go.

To the right we will write 6.7 kilograms and then we will write our length, which is 62, our width, which is 45, height, which is 52.5, but they are going to round it up, so we will only put 53. If you are not sure about your size, always you can use some of these common box dimensions which should at least give you an idea of ​​what the cost would be. Lastly, there's a box down here that you just want to leave unchecked, you can read. The question is whether this really applies to you, but if you send products and not these types of documents according to the European Union, everything will be fine, so at this point we can get a quote and we can get an idea.

If this shipping is really going to be fair, do you know it will be too expensive or will it actually be too cheap? Then we fulfill our quotes. In this scenario, we have two different options if we were to ship today, Friday. On March 3rd, one would get it at the end of the day, one would be the latest at 12pm, so you know, we'd probably pay a little bit more for this, so let's go for the cheapest one, so we'll go to a calculator conversion just type CNY to USD into Google, you will be able to get this conversion, so once we paste it there we can see that our total cost for this shipment is one thousand five hundred and seventy-five dollars compared to an Alibaba.

They say here that if we opt for express air shipping, it would now cost $254 if the supplier honors that quote. This is definitely a better option than using DHL, which is a very popular international carrier, so that's one way to go. about this and find out if DHL offers a better option and at least give you an idea of ​​what is fair, obviously this quote on Alibaba was more than fair and a very good price for this size box. The next option is

alibaba

.com Logistics. This time we'll write down very similar information, a little more detail to understand what's really in the Box, and then we'll be faced with over a dozen quotes from all the different logistics providers and carriers.

We can ship these products so I put a link in the description where you can go directly here and you can use it for your order. The first questions we must answer are: Is this a dangerous shipment? No, it's not, so we'll select that. and then you must select that this is not a personal submission. Alibaba does not currently support personal shipping, so please select that below. If you have a trade assurance number, be sure to go ahead and enter it there and then for this example remember that "We are only shipping to Los Angeles, let's say we live there, but you can also mark that you are shipping to a US Fulfillment warehouse.

Amazon from Amazon, scroll down to Products ready so that's when they're ready to be shipped from the supplier location, let's say We're ready to ship tomorrow the 4th and then we'll go down and type in our box information. This was the box in the example above. Now what's a little different here is that we're not going to write down the three dimensions while we wait for the Box, we're going to write down the weight and then the total volume, so I'll share with you how to do that here in a second. The first thing we want to do is simply confirm the number of units this is not how many units are in the box what they are referring to here is the number of units or the number of boxes that we have a box contained in our 60 pieces, so keep it as one we'll jump to the total weight since it's easy, we already have the units converted correctly: 6.7 kilograms per box or per box, then we need to calculate the total volume in cubic meters or cubic feet since we have our dimensions in centimeters, we can quickly convert it to cubic meters and I'll show you how to do that right now, so in centimeters let's take our Dimensions 62, they will multiply all 62 by 45 by 53, rounding up to get 147,870 cubic centimeters.

Now we need to convert. this from cubic centimeters to cubic meters, so we're going to go here and we're going to type um, I already have it up here, but you can type the number and put cubic centimeters to cubic meters and Google will show We can calculate that volume for you, so type 147,870 cubic centimeters and we'll end up with 0.148 rounded cubic meters, so type 0.148 here and click Next. Step number two is our origin and destination details, where do we ship from? We ship to the origin location will be your supplier's location unless they state otherwise you know everything needs to be picked up at the nearest port or airport but you can usually pick up everything at the factory or type warehouse. country of origin, region, type China here, let me go ahead and type the city here, okay, type the destination location for this example, we are shipping residential to Los Angeles, so type United States of America, loss of Los Angeles and select the next step, the end.

Step is number three. These are your customs and additional services. This is where you can add insurance that you have added to your carrier and your shipment just to protect it. For this example, we will say that we need customs clearance for an item that We are not going to add insurance and we are not going to worry about this, buy a customs bond and then click search and reserve and in about 10 to 20 seconds we will find you with all these different quotes on what your cost will be, so it'll take a second here. It's still loading as you can see prices are going down but we're already seeing cheaper shipping costs compared to DHL so that's good news so I think it's finally stopped. there, but as you can see, you know there are a ton of different vendors here that you can go ahead and buy from, so the cheapest one just to give us an idea was $713 and you can expand on this to go into more detail about what What are they.

They actually charge for pickup fees, customs clearance, and then generally just freight fees, but you know the important thing is that this is $713, it's a lot more expensive than what Alibaba quotes here at $254 for freight. aerial.