Almost every complaint about a freight invoice comes down to the same thing: the customer compared an ocean freight quote against a landed cost. They are not the same number, and on some lanes they are not even close. This is the whole list, in the order the charges occur.
1. What happens in China before the box is on a ship
Pre-carriage is the trucking from your supplier’s factory to the load port or the consolidation warehouse. It is priced by distance and by truck size, and it is the one charge that varies most between suppliers who are nominally in the same city — a factory in outer Dongguan and one near Shenzhen port can differ by several hundred dollars for the same container.
Then origin terminal handling (THC), the export customs declaration, and — if you are consolidating from several suppliers — warehouse handling and re-palletising. None of these are large individually. Together they routinely add up to more than people budget for.
2. The ocean freight itself
This is the number carriers quote and the number that moves with the market. It is priced per container on FCL and per revenue tonne on LCL, and it can double or halve inside a quarter. It is also, on most lanes, the only part of the bill that is genuinely negotiable.
Our published rates are the ocean leg plus the components noted on each lane page. For example the Ningbo to Felixstowe container rate and the Shanghai to Rotterdam rate are both quoted per box, port to port; the China to Germany door-to-door sea service is quoted differently because it includes the delivery leg.
3. Surcharges that ride on the freight
- BAF / fuel — moves with bunker prices, usually revised monthly.
- Peak season surcharge — applied when space tightens, typically August to October on the Europe and North America lanes.
- Congestion surcharge — imposed when a specific port is backed up. Unpredictable by nature.
- Currency adjustment — on lanes not quoted in USD.
These are not padding invented by your forwarder. They come from the carrier’s tariff and they appear on the carrier’s own bill.
4. Destination — where the surprises live
Destination THC, the import customs entry, and any inspection. Then duty and import tax, which are assessed on your declared value against your tariff heading, not on the freight. And then demurrage and detention if the container is not collected and returned inside the free time on the booking.
Free time is worth more attention than it usually gets. Fourteen free days at a port where clearance reliably takes four is comfortable. Seven free days at a port where clearance takes ten is a bill waiting to happen, and it will exceed the ocean freight on a bad week.
5. The last leg
Delivery from the terminal to your door, priced on distance and on whether the receiving address can take a full container. A site with no forklift and no dock needs a tail-lift truck and a palletised load, which changes both the trucking cost and how the container had to be packed in China — a decision made weeks earlier, on the other side of the world.
Putting a real number on it
Rather than reason about percentages, run your own consignment through a fixed-weight page and read the result. Shipping 100 KG from China to the UK and the same lane at 500 KG use the identical tariff and show how sharply the cost per kilo falls as the shipment grows.
If you want to compare across modes before committing, the country overviews set them side by side: shipping from China to the UK, to Germany, to the United States. The full lane list is on the freight rates index.
