The freight forwarding service charges you the postage fees along with a range of their own fees depending on the services provided. They then post your package to your Australian address using their own postal service, the US Postal Service or a courier service (DHL, UPS, FedEx etc). These services exist in a number of countries, but this article focuses on US to Australia freight forwarding services.įreight forwarding services receive your packages from US retailers, store them in their warehouse and provide other optional services like repacking and consolidating. What are freight forwarding services?įreight forwarding services let consumers shop from US stores that don't ship to Australia.Ĭonsumers order their product to be delivered to the freight forwarder's US address – often a warehouse in a state with no, or low sales tax – which receives their purchases and forwards them to Australia for a fee. We look at how it works, what the costs are and compare popular freight-forwarding companies such as Shipito, US to Oz and more. A service that repacks and removes excess packaging, or consolidates items into one package, could save you moneyĪny Aussie who regularly shops online will know the frustration of picking out purchases on an American website, only to discover at the checkout that the company doesn't ship to Australia.įreight-forwarding services look like the answer to this problem, but are they everything they're cracked up to be?.You won't know how much you'll pay in freight until your package hits their warehouse – and it may be more than you thought.Freight-forwarding services let you buy items from the US that aren't available in Australia.The package forwarder ships the package out and the shopper receives the package at home.Shoppers pay the package forwarder for various package handling services and an international shipping fee.Package forwarders receive the package and register to the shopper and usually provide some sort of storage.The shopper places an online order and for the shipping address, uses the native shipping address and the member number (usually presented like a suite number).The shopper first gets a native shipping address (which is the same as the package forwarders warehouse) and a member number (account number) from a package forwarder.The customer usually has the option to instruct the mail forwarding company how, when and where to ship their package and also to pick which shipper to use.Ī package forwarding service works normally with five steps: Since 2010, this (US) model has been emulated internationally and currently there are many countries offering a very similar service to overseas buyers. US package forwarding services help international shoppers with shipping their purchases from the US to their home address or help them place a direct order with the US retailers if they do not have a US billing address. For instance, US online stores are popular worldwide, but some of them only ship to US addresses or their international shipping rates are prohibitive. There are several challenges with cross-border (US retailer) online shopping, and these include shipping and paying for orders. Communication issues caused by language barriers between shoppers and retailers.The price differences between domestic stores and international stores.Transit safety and insurance features provided by some providers.The needs of shoppers in one country that desire to buy from online retailers from another country.Possibility of shopping from Amazon and eBay from areas where these companies don't ship.The convenient of international checkout with PayPal and others.
Fast development of online e-commerce shopping.There are several reasons that caused package forwarding service into existence: Mail forwarding refers to the mail in traditional meaning, or magazines or papers that are normally called mail, while package forwarding refers to online purchases or orders that are shipped within a bag or a box. A package forwarding service is different from mail forwarding.
Package forwarding service is provided by package forwarders to make cross-border shopping convenient and easy, getting rid of the problems in payment and shipping. Package forwarding is becoming more and more popular among international shoppers because of the high growth rate of e-commerce websites and shipping limitations of most such websites. Package forwarding, also called parcel forwarding, is an international shipping service offered by shipping companies to international online shoppers who want to do cross-border online shopping.