Direct / Indirect Line - What Is It Stand For?

Question:

In the past, I sent several times directly to Amazon’s FBA’s.

In some cases, the forwarded informed me of direct shipments to the warehouse and in other cases, I was told that the goods have to undergo palletizing before delivery.

Why?

Answer:

Every forwarder has stronger and weaker shipping lines.

A shipper is defined by the volume of cargo it can handle on a weekly basis. There is no seller who is willing to wait several weeks for his shipment to leave the country of origin, so shippers work on volume on a weekly basis only.

Furthermore, in many cases, Amazon send ‘shippers’, after they have opened shipping plans, to regular/central warehouses in the USA, for example: las1, gyr3, lax9, ont8 etc.

Which is why many forwarders have fixed lines to the central warehouses, from where they can make a direct delivery from the port to Amazon, without the need for palletizing.

The forwarders usually don’t have enough weekly volume for smaller/faraway warehouses, and therefore, make console shipments to specific destinations. In other words, consolidate a number of shipments of a number of customers and deliver the cargo to a temp warehouse in the US for offloading prior to delivery.

Upon consolidating a number of shipments to a specific destination, the forwarder will ship the goods together as a groupage and deliver to a specific FBA warehouse.

The difference between these cases/methods creates a difference in price between a direct service to that which includes palletizing before delivery, even if it’s the same warehouse.

Additionally, another advantage of direct delivery is that it speeds up shipping times vs. shipping that includes palletizing.