How to Quickly Compare Shipping Quotes

Alright, in this tip I will be talking about how to quickly compare shipping quotes from multiple freight forwarders. This will allow you to quickly determine the general price range for how much it is going to cost to ship your shipment.

You can also use this method to see if your current freight forwarders quote is reasonable or not. I will get into all of this and how to do it below!

How to Get Multiple Freight Forwarding Quotes

This tip is will work for air and sea shipping quotes. However, I have only used the sea shipping quotes so I cannot say if you will receive many quotes for air shipping.

With that being said, the tool we will be using today is called forwarders.com. This is a site that will connect you with freight forwarders and help you get multiple quotes.

1. Go to Forwarders.com

Click here to visit the site – http://forwarders.com

It should look like the image below:

2. Click “Free Quotations”

Next, from the home you will want to click on the “Free Quotation” button

3. Choose Your Shipping Location

You have 3 options to choose from:

Your shipment is within USA only
Your shipment is between USA and other countries
Your shipment does not involve USA

Choose the one that fits your scenario, for me it was the “between the USA and other countries” option as I was shipping from China to the US.

4. Fill Out the Form with your Shipment Info

You will see a form that looks like the one below:

The first section where it asks for your phone number, name, etc is self explanatory. As for the other two sections, “Brief description of your cargo” and “Brief description of services required”, need some further explanation.

Brief Description of your Cargo Section

In this section you should describe your product info. Things such as weight, CBM and the amount of units are very important.

Here is a small list of good suggestions:

Number of Packages
Weight of Packages
Dimensions of the packages (L x W x H)
Details of the commodity
If hazardous give IMCO # and UN # and packing group
How are the goods packed such as on pallets, in boxes etc?
If you want us to arrange door to door shipment, please provide the addresses
If you wish to ship as a Full Container Load please advise if 20 foot or 40 foot?

Just try to give them as much info as possible, but if they need more they will ask you for it when they contact you.

Brief Description of Services Required Section

In this section you will need to explain what you would like them to do for you. Some important things to touch on:

Where you want them to pick up your shipment from (supplier’s warehouse, port, etc)
Where you want them to take the shipment (your house, warehouse, Amazon’s warehouse, etc)
If they apply labels

Those things are the most important.

5. Submit Form

Once you fill out the form with your information, click the submit button at the bottom of the form.

6. Wait a Couple Days for Multiple Quotes

Within the next couple of days you will start to be contacted by freight forwarders with quotes.

There might some additional info that they need before they give you a quote, but most of the time they won’t.

What to do With These Quotes

Now that you have multiple quotes from different freight forwarders you can now use this information to help you make some decisions. There are a couple things that you can do with these quotes:

Get an Estimate on your Shipping Costs

After you get quotes from multiple forwarders you will be able to get a ballpark estimate what it will cost you to ship your product. This is useful because you can use this info to help you calculate your estimated profit margins.

You will be able to see if this product will be viale to ship and if it makes sense.

For example, if you found a product you liked but you received multiple quotes that were extremely high that would make selling this product pointless. This is vital info that you need to figure out at some point.

Compare these Quotes to your Own Freight Forwarder

Another thing that you can do with these quotes is compare them to your current quote from your forwarder. If the quotes from Forwarder.com were all cheaper than your current quote, then you might want to think about finding a new forwarder.

Use one of these Forwarders

Obviously, you can use any of the freight forwarders that contact you. I personally didn’t find my freight forwarder from here but there is no reason you can’t!

This will save you time from searching Google to find a good freight forwarder, instead they will find you.

Conclusion

That does it for this tip, hope you enjoyed it!

Getting a bunch of different shipping quotes is good no matter what you do with the info. It will help you make better informed decisions and will save you money, which is the most important thing.

Thank you all for reading and make sure to come back tomorrow for another tip!