Whether you're sending a single item directly to a consumer, or hundreds of pallets worth of goods to a third party logistics centre, you have a choice of sea or air freight when it comes to shipping your wares across the Atlantic Ocean.
Exporting via air is the faster and obvious choice for orders going directly to customers, even if the individual items are quite large (as long as they can still fit on a plane, that is!). Couriers like Fedex, DHL and so on will quote for air shipping by default on small orders.
In the case you’re bulk exporting several pallets worth of your products to an initial location, sea freight can work out cheaper, but whether it’s worth it depends on the total amount you’re sending.
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The cost of transatlantic freight is highly demand-driven. Seasonality, weather, natural disasters, the economic environment and geopolitics all play their role. Even events a long way away from the transatlantic route can cause demand to spike if shipments are diverted there as an alternative.
With that caveat, here is an extremely rough indication of the costs you’re likely to pay to ship a single standard-sized pallet of goods:
We regularly send small non-pallet shipments of 30kg-50kg between the US East Coast and UK by air freight, costing $250-$300 and with the total time from booking the shipment with the courier to arrival at destination being 6-7 days.
If you have more than a few pallets to send, get quotes for both air and sea freight to compare. Smaller shipments would class as ‘Less than Container Load’ (LCL) and be shipped in a container along with other importers’ goods. A ‘Full Container Load’ (FCL) would be the lowest cost option when considered on a per-item basis.
Our experience with shipping multiple pallets by sea, and part and full container loads, has been total times closer to a month. Tourist ships can cross the Atlantic in less than a week, but container ships move at a glacial pace and 15 days on the ocean from London to New York is normal.
On top of this, you should expect your goods to be hanging around at port to board a specific ship, and then again at the other end to be unloaded and go through what always seem to be more stringent and lengthy customs checks.
One of the cool things about shipping by sea rather than by air is you often get a link to a ship tracker showing exactly where on the ocean your ship is. So your heart can skip a few beats as you check whether it's going to miss that huge storm spinning its way up from the Caribbean.
While air freight can be arranged directly with a courier such as DHL or Fedex, with the courier also able to complete and generate customs documentation, for sea freight you'll need to approach both a freight forwarder to arrange the practicalities of the shipment and a customs broker to handle the customs paperwork.
Your freight forwarder may be able to recommend a broker. Paperwork can be worked on while the shipment is on the water, but you'll probably want to have identified who you're going to use before anything gets moving.
A viable strategy for a North American direct-to-consumer brand to consider is designating their North American base as their main distribution centre and topping up their UK base with very small air shipments on a regular basis, rather than sending a much larger load all in one go.
That allows you to reduce the risk of overstocking on particular inventory in the UK, keep rental costs low in the UK, and spread the cost of freight over a longer period of time. This might appeal to brands with higher numbers of SKUs who are unsure as to the initial demand for their products.
You do have options when it comes to how to send your goods. But air freight, despite being more expensive, has the advantages of speed, flexibility and simplicity over sea freight. And there's a lot to be said for those kinds of benefits if you're a direct-to-consumer ecommerce brand.
