Shipping from China to South Africa
Shipping goods as a small- to medium-sized business from China to South Africa can quickly become a nightmarish task. Here’s the crux of the matter: nobody can trust logistics.
Even when business owners ship through some of the best-known courier agents in the country, they’re met with a nasty knot of expensive complications – exorbitant freight fees, demurrage charges, export licenses, importers codes, and so on.
Furthermore, nobody ever seems to be available to answer the phone. It becomes nearly impossible to track down parcels. This can pose a real problem for business owners who are trying to predict when their shipment will arrive so that they can lay down actionable business plans.
The secrets to successful shipping from China to South Africa
There is, however, a light at the end of the tunnel. There are a few steps that you can take to turn shipping woes into shipping wins.
– Secret Number One: Making Your Stock Manageable
Unforeseen overhead costs threaten to drown small businesses all the time. For Takealot merchants, costs like success fees, fulfillment fees, and storage fees can stack up – quickly.
Moreover, Takealot imposes penalties on slow-moving products which sit in their warehouses for more than thirty days. Their storage fees are calculated using this formula: Stock Cover = (Total Stock / Sales unit in the last 30 days) times by 30. Stock cover refers to the amount of time that inventory is predicted to last according to the current rate of sales.
This means that the more time that your inventory is predicted to sit in a Takealot warehouse, the higher those storage fees are going to climb.
So, how are you supposed to know what product is going to sell quickly and what is going to sit in a warehouse for months on end?
You can’t. But, you can order your goods in smaller quantities. That might feel counterintuitive for a smart business thinker, but there are many benefits to ordering small. These include:
Shipping from China to South Africa can include delays, lost parcels, and unanswered customer service hotlines. Airpool empowers you with total transparency so that you can calculate your business costs and timelines accurately and efficiently.
When you ship your goods with Airpool, you’ll know exactly where they are at any given moment thanks to our live tracking system. We’ll provide you with set delivery times so that you can plan ahead and avoid the costly repercussions of late deliveries like penalties and suspension.
Our instant quote generator also calculates your landed costs. When you combine this information with Takealot’s success, fulfillment, and storage fees, you’ll have a crystal-clear idea of your business costs and how to price your goods accordingly.
– Secret Number Three: Speed and Frequency
Airpool ships exclusively by air freight – it’s in the name! Shipping smaller quantities via air freight rather than sea freight reduces lead times, which gives you the flexibility to react to market volatility more quickly.
Consolidating your shipments with Airpool results in lower freight costs, therefore widening your profit margins and allowing you to undercut your competitors with lower prices. With our consolidation service, you can also ship more frequently at a lower cost.
In short: shipping smaller quantities with Airpool frees up your capital to go straight back into growing your business.
When you consolidate smaller quantities of diverse products with Airpool, you’re saving on inventory costs, giving yourself the flexibility to test out the viability of different products, and pouring spared capital back into your business.
Get in touch with Airpool at https://airpool.co.za/ to get your Takealot business off to a strong start!
Landed cost is the sum of all expenses associated with importing your goods from China to South Africa. This includes the cost of the goods paid to your supplier, the shipping costs, clearance costs and the import taxes & duties.
It is represented on a per unit cost and helps you with:
Note: This is not what you are paying to Airpool but rather what you are paying to all the suppliers and relevant parties: Airpool, the Manufacturer of the goods and the Import Taxes (VAT & Duties)
