Courier or sea freight from China to Singapore: when to switch

1China to Singapore courier or freight: who this is for

You buy on Taobao, Tmall, 1688 or Pinduoduo. Each order comes to Singapore by express courier, and the shipping line on the order has started to look like the price of the goods. It happens to small shops restocking, to people furnishing a new flat, and to anyone whose orders have grown from one parcel to several cartons. This post explains how courier pricing works, where consolidated sea or air freight becomes the cheaper way, and when a courier is still the right choice.

One thing first, so you can weigh what follows. Shiplet does not offer express courier or single parcels to Singapore. We are a freight forwarder: suppliers deliver to our warehouse in China, we ship the cargo by sea or air as one consignment, clear it through Singapore Customs and deliver it to your address. So we have no reason to tell you a courier is never right. For one small box you want next week, it usually is.

2How courier pricing works: you pay for size as well as weight

An express courier prices a parcel by weight, but the weight it bills is not always the one on the scale. It is the greater of the actual weight and the volumetric weight, which is worked out from the parcel's size: length × width × height in centimetres, divided by a number the courier sets, called the divisor. Some express couriers divide by 5000. Our air freight divides by 6000. The smaller the divisor, the heavier the same box counts.

Take one carton of cushions, 60 × 40 × 40 cm, weighing 4 kg. Its volume is 96,000 cm³. Divided by 5000, that is 19.2 kg of volumetric weight, so the carton is billed as 19.2 kg: almost five times what it weighs. Now order a dozen cartons like it and the courier bills you for well over 200 kg of cushions.

Dense goods do not suffer from this. A box of phone cases, tools or screws weighs about what its size suggests, so it is billed on its real weight, and a courier moves it efficiently. The goods that get expensive are the light, bulky ones: cushions, lampshades, plastic storage boxes, folding chairs, toys in display boxes, anything flat-packed with a lot of air around it. You are paying to move space, at a price set by the kilo.

3How consolidated sea and air freight are priced

Sea LCL is priced by space, not by kilo. Our rate is S$85 per CBM, hub to door, with a minimum of 1 CBM, so a shipment smaller than that is billed as 1 CBM, which is S$85. Weight only comes in for heavy cargo: the charge is on the greater of the volume and the weight at 500 kg per CBM. Light, bulky goods are billed on their volume alone, with no volumetric surcharge on top. The carton of cushions above is 0.096 CBM.

Air freight works like a courier's maths but for consolidated cargo: from S$6.50 per kg, charged on the greater of actual and volumetric weight with a divisor of 6000, minimum 10 kg (S$65). The same carton of cushions counts as 16 kg by our air freight, against 19.2 kg at a divisor of 5000.

Both rates are the whole freight bill, hub to door: receiving and checking your cartons at our warehouse in China, consolidating several suppliers into one shipment, the freight, the Singapore import permit and customs clearance (we lodge it as a Registered Declaring Agent), delivery to your Singapore address and cargo cover (anything lost is paid at declared invoice value). Outside the rate are GST and any duty, collection from a supplier who will not deliver to us, storage beyond 20 days at the Guangzhou warehouse and special handling such as stairs or unpacking.

4Where sea or air freight overtakes the courier

Comparing a price per kg with a price per CBM in the abstract gets you nowhere. Compare what your courier charges for these cartons against what we would. Three markers help:

• S$85 by sea. That is our sea minimum, and it carries anything up to 1 CBM, and up to 500 kg, hub to door. If your courier quotes more than that for cartons that fit in 1 CBM, and the goods can wait 10–16 days, sea is cheaper on freight.
• One CBM is a lot of weight to a courier. 1,000,000 cm³ divided by 5000 is 200 kg of billed weight; divided by 6000, about 166.7 kg. Ask your courier what it charges for 200 kg and you will see why bulky orders belong in a shared container.
• S$6.50 per kg by air, from 10 kg. If the goods are needed sooner than sea allows, compare your courier's price per billed kg with ours. Our air arrives in 3–5 days hub to door, and the 6000 divisor makes the same carton count lighter.

The courier column is a weight, not a price, on purpose. Courier rates differ by service, by account and by season, and we will not guess at them. Ask your courier for the price of that billed weight, or look at the shipping line on your last order, and put it beside the sea column. The bigger and lighter the cargo, the wider the gap grows, because the courier's billed weight rises with every centimetre of box while our sea price ignores weight altogether below 500 kg per CBM.

To run your own numbers, the CBM calculator turns carton sizes into volume and a sea figure, and the chargeable weight calculator shows what the same cartons weigh on paper at a divisor of 6000 and of 5000.

5GST: where air and sea differ

Singapore charges GST at 9% on the import value: the cost of the goods plus insurance and freight, plus duty if any. An air shipment valued below S$400 is not charged GST; sea freight has no such allowance, so a sea shipment pays GST whatever its value. A courier parcel comes in by air too, so one valued below S$400 is not charged GST at import either, though a GST-registered marketplace may already have charged it at checkout.

When you consolidate, the shipment is valued as a whole, so several orders together are more likely to pass S$400 even by air. Put that in your sums. The import GST calculator works out the figure from your order value, and the GST and customs clearance guide explains how it is assessed. We pay the GST at clearance and pass it through at cost, on the same bill as the freight. A GST-registered business that wants to claim it back can be the importer on the permit itself, at an extra charge (pricing).

6How to switch: several orders, one shipment

1. Get an instant quote. Put the volume or weight into the quote form and the instant quote appears as you type. You get a reference number straight away, and our team sends the confirmed quote in writing within a few hours. Your booking confirmation carries a marking code, SHIPLET/ followed by four characters, for this shipment only.
2. Change the address at checkout. Instead of the seller's international shipping, choose delivery inside China to our Guangzhou warehouse, near Foshan. Put the marking code in the recipient name and copy the Chinese address exactly. A shop with free shipping (包邮) costs you nothing to reach us.
3. We receive and hold. The Guangzhou warehouse receives every day, 9:00am – 6:00pm, Sundays included, and holds cargo free for 20 days while the rest of your orders arrive. Parcels from different shops are arranged neatly in the sellers' own packaging as part of the rate; complete repacking costs extra, on request.
4. One shipment, cleared and delivered. When the last order is in, everything leaves together. We lodge the import permit, clear customs and deliver to your door. You pay when your cargo reaches Singapore, before we deliver it, by PayNow or bank transfer.

Our warehouse address, ready to copy into Taobao, 1688 or Pinduoduo:

Air cargo goes to the same warehouse, with the same free storage. For paperwork, an order screenshot from Taobao, Tmall, 1688 or Pinduoduo is accepted as the invoice if it clearly shows the seller, the item, the quantity and the amount paid; once a shipment holds more than five different items, we need a packing list as well. The whole process, shop by shop, is in the Taobao consolidated shipping guide.

7When a courier is still the right choice

• One or two small parcels, especially dense ones that weigh about what their size suggests.
• A sample or a replacement part needed within days, where speed matters more than cost.
• Clothes, shoes and small light items from Taobao. The platforms run their own small-parcel shipping for these, and for a few kilos it is better value than our 1 CBM sea minimum.
• Goods that must go straight from the seller to you, with no stop at a warehouse in China.

A rough rule: if everything you are buying would fit in a couple of shoe boxes, stay with the courier or the platform. If it would fill a car boot, or it is coming from several suppliers, put the carton sizes into the CBM calculator and compare. For a fuller picture of sea, air and courier side by side, read the China to Singapore shipping guide; the air freight guide and the sea freight guide go deeper on each. When you are ready, get an instant quote.