When shipping your goods from China (or nearly any other country), you have a couple of options in terms of sea freight: you can fill up an entire container, which is called Full Container Load (FCL), or you can fill up part of a container, called Less than Container Load (LCL) , in which case, you share it with a bunch of other people and only pay for the space your products take up. For LCL shipments, your freight forwarder will arrange to have your container filled with other people's shipments (there's no shortage of demand for LCL freight in China!). Don't worry—you don't have to call a bunch of factories in China, asking if they would like to share a container with you.
There are pros and cons to both methods. An exhaustive list would be longer than this, but below are some of the main thoughts along with things which might not be entirely obvious on the surface.
For transport from your home port of your container, it generally works out cheaper pound for pound (or CBM for CBM) than FCL (generally, in my experience, I'll pay around $300 to move a few pallets or $1000 to move an entire container which can hold dozens of pallets). The biggest downside to FCL is, of course, that you need to fill the container or come close to filling it. I've heard a general rule of thumb is that you need at least 15 to 20 CBM worth of goods to make filling a 20′ container worth it. If you make an order to fill an entire 20′ container, it's not unheard of for your supplier to come back to you after production and say that it turns out all of your goods won't fit in a 20′ container, so how about you order a 40′ container worth of goods instead. That said, some sellers opt to fill up an entire 20′ container and then book the excess product under LCL to cut costs.
LCL Pros and Cons
LCL Pros | LCL Cons |
. A good option for smaller shipments | .Goods can go missing and/or get damaged more easily |
. Reasonably priced . Easier to arrange during the peak shipping season | .It can take longer and is more prone to delays |
LCL is a great option for smaller shipments, especially below 15CBM. You can even use LCL freight for shipments as little as 1 CBM (1 CBM is the minimum chargeable volume even if you go lower). If you're somewhere in the 5CBM to15CBM range, then LCL freight is generally your go-to option. And overall, LCL freight is very affordable: around $50 to $150 per CBM generally at the time of writing. However, there are serious drawbacks to LCL freight, most importantly in terms of loss of control. If you've ever seen YouTube videos showing FedEx or UPS man-handling packages, throwing them around, and cramming them into the back of a delivery truck, then you've seen a comparable example of LCL freight.
While it's harder to throw around a pallet full of products than a small box from Amazon, forklifts can work magic and damage your shipments! With that being said, shipments do tend to be handled with some degree of care. With LCL shipments, there's also a lot more room for things to go wrong. When you have a pallet of goods being crammed in a container with a dozen other people's products, there's an increased likelihood your pallet will go missing or get mixed up with someone else's. It's rare (and hopefully, insurance covers any such cases), but it does happen. LCL shipments can take longer simply because of the fact that the freight forwarder must arrange to get multiple people's shipments loaded into one container and unloaded once it arrives.
Conclusion
The vast majority of the time, you'll have little choice in how you ship your products. If you have 30CBM worth of goods, LCL freight isn't really an option. If you have 5CBM FCL, freight equally is not an option. However, in borderline cases where you have 15-20CBM worth of goods, it's important to keep the pros and cons of both LCL and FCL freight in mind.