Regarding our shipping agents... for anyone interested, this is how we ship our product. If someone is looking to ship their products, let us know if you have questions about our experience. We'd be happy to help.
We use Easyship.com to purchase postage. There are other similar postage sellers, but Easyship has rich eCommerce integrations, free plug-ins for your web site, and lots of carrier choices (depending on source and destination). You use their carrier accounts, so you get a high volume shipper pricing discount. They have 24/7 customer support that are typically very helpful. The downside is, using Easyship's carrier accounts means we don't have a direct relationship with the carrier. We have to go through Easyship for issues.
Depending on destination, we get a list of available carriers to choose from. We typically select DHL, as they are fast, have detailed tracking, they handle customs issues and (usually) have a reasonable cost. We've had other, cheaper carriers loose packages, and often those carriers do not deliver the last mile, they hand the parcel over to the local post office which makes it hard to track. FedEx also charges fees for handling customs issues, and charge a surcharge for residential addresses.
Once we purchase postage, our fulfillment warehouse gets the order, they are integrated with Easyship. The fulfillment warehouse prints the shipping docs generated by Easyship, sticks it on the box, then waits for the carrier to pick them up. The carrier is automatically notified to pick up the parcels through Easyship integration. So Easyship is really the only one we have to deal with most of the time. We have a contract with the fulfillment warehouse, and pay the warehouse for receiving fees, storage fees, and fees for boxing up and shipping our product.
We ship from Hong Kong, which is where most of the major warehouse fulfillment companies are based. By shipping from Hong Kong, we don't have the extra expense and time of getting our product shipped to the USA when more than half of NDLR orders are not from USA. And we don't have to pay USA's China tariffs. Hong Kong is a duty free port, which is why all the warehouse logistics companies are there.
Further reading: https://www.chinaimportal.com/blog/fulfi...hong-kong/
We use Easyship.com to purchase postage. There are other similar postage sellers, but Easyship has rich eCommerce integrations, free plug-ins for your web site, and lots of carrier choices (depending on source and destination). You use their carrier accounts, so you get a high volume shipper pricing discount. They have 24/7 customer support that are typically very helpful. The downside is, using Easyship's carrier accounts means we don't have a direct relationship with the carrier. We have to go through Easyship for issues.
Depending on destination, we get a list of available carriers to choose from. We typically select DHL, as they are fast, have detailed tracking, they handle customs issues and (usually) have a reasonable cost. We've had other, cheaper carriers loose packages, and often those carriers do not deliver the last mile, they hand the parcel over to the local post office which makes it hard to track. FedEx also charges fees for handling customs issues, and charge a surcharge for residential addresses.
Once we purchase postage, our fulfillment warehouse gets the order, they are integrated with Easyship. The fulfillment warehouse prints the shipping docs generated by Easyship, sticks it on the box, then waits for the carrier to pick them up. The carrier is automatically notified to pick up the parcels through Easyship integration. So Easyship is really the only one we have to deal with most of the time. We have a contract with the fulfillment warehouse, and pay the warehouse for receiving fees, storage fees, and fees for boxing up and shipping our product.
We ship from Hong Kong, which is where most of the major warehouse fulfillment companies are based. By shipping from Hong Kong, we don't have the extra expense and time of getting our product shipped to the USA when more than half of NDLR orders are not from USA. And we don't have to pay USA's China tariffs. Hong Kong is a duty free port, which is why all the warehouse logistics companies are there.
Further reading: https://www.chinaimportal.com/blog/fulfi...hong-kong/