Reposting this reply here from another, incorrect thread:
TimButterfield wrote:
Though usually uninsured, logistics companies trade a bit of risk for cost savings. They create whole pallets of packages to ship together for the bulk savings. Back when I was shipping new knife purchases received in Delaware to go the republic of Georgia, I was usually paying less than $20 and often less than $15 per package depending on size and weight. If the combined package value was over about $110 (300 GEL), I would also need to pay the import VAT before I could collect it. That required me getting my own revenue ID to pay taxes against. Even with the higher risk during shipping, if doing many purchases, it was substantially less than the local dealer. Of all of the purchases made during that time, only one shipment was lost, though that one was a CRK.
SpyderEdgeForever wrote: ↑Thu Oct 17, 2024 9:09 am
My next question related to this to you and others is this: based on this knowledge, how easy or difficult would it be for a knife enthusiast like us to start a special international knife shipping business (say a group of people or individual getting the business loans from small business association or crowd funding) that limits the size to standard shipping containers that can fit knives ( so its not a general purpose shipping company if that makes things easier) and ship knives only to retail customers worldwide? Will such a company still face all the red tape and bureacracy even if they tell those countries they will have their own employees watching over the package of knives from start to finish to prevent theft?
While possible, some of the similar issues remain: Import taxes will still need to be handled at each destination, whether enforced by a company or handled by the individual person. Getting significant discounts on shipping (as in my example above) will likely require scale per destination. An entire pallet of knives could be shipped to a single country/city at greatly reduced costs per knife. When that single pallet is split across time and/or destination, the costs per knife increases. Having a smaller package/container than a pallet would have higher costs per knife. There would need to be a lot of calculations to determine cost effectiveness of different container sizes for batching individual orders of 1 or more knives each. This is one of the factors that make a more generic logistics company possible. They can fill an entire pallet with orders from many different vendors going to the same destination city or, perhaps, to a country/area where the pallet may be split and forwarded in smaller groups. When only knives are on the pallet, the shipping of that pallet may be delayed while additional orders are accumulated going to the same destination. That time cost could potentially be prohibitive as the customer may not be willing to wait the additional weeks or months required to accumulate a full pallet to ship. Having a smaller container would reduce the time cost with a trade off for increased shipping costs. There is also the additional factors of wether to pay extra for batch shipment insurance, self-insure (as the logistics company), or ignore have the customer take the risk in order to reduce shipping costs for the batch. When you factor those together along with having some receiving company (or branch) and those employees at each possible source and desination area, it's not an easy puzzle to solve. it is possible, but would be a lot of work to set up if the numbers show it to be feasible.
