gifts, promotional products and party supplies / Buying guide
Shipping costs for gift orders
Carriers bill on whichever is greater: what the shipment weighs, or what it occupies. Gift goods are almost always bulkier than they are heavy, so the second number is the one you pay on — and it is the number nobody checks before ordering.
Everything that reduces a gift shipment’s cost is about volume: repacking, removing retail boxes, and putting several small buys into one consignment rather than many.
In this guide
How volumetric weight works
Volume in cubic centimetres is divided by a dimensional factor — commonly 5000 or 6000 for air, depending on the carrier and service — to produce a weight in kilograms. If that number is higher than the actual weight, it is what you are charged on.
A carton of 60 × 40 × 40 cm is 96,000 cm³. At a factor of 6000 it bills as 16 kg however little it actually weighs. A carton of plush toys that weighs 4 kg costs the same to fly as 16 kg of keyrings.
What actually reduces the bill
- Repacking at the warehouse: taking goods out of retail cartons and packing them tight. Routinely a third off a bulky shipment.
- Consolidation: ten booth purchases arriving as ten parcels cost far more than the same goods in two cartons.
- Flat-packing anything that can be flat-packed, and asking the seller not to pre-assemble.
- Choosing sea once the volume justifies it — the crossover comes much earlier for bulky goods than for dense ones.
Which route, roughly
- Under about 30 kg chargeable: express air, 3–7 days, simple, expensive per kilo.
- 30–100 kg: consolidated air freight, 7–14 days, needs a customs broker.
- Above roughly 1 cubic metre: sea LCL, 25–45 days plus inland, priced per cubic metre.
- Several cubic metres: a full container, at which point per-unit freight becomes almost negligible.
Costs people forget
- Duty, assessed on the goods' classification in your country, not on what the invoice calls them.
- Customs clearance and handling at destination, charged whether or not duty is payable.
- Storage at the warehouse once the free period ends, which matters if you are accumulating a mixed order slowly.
- Dangerous-goods surcharges on anything with a battery, a liquid, an aerosol or a magnet.
Questions & answers
Common questions
- Is it cheaper to ship everything at once?
- Almost always. The fixed costs of a consignment are charged once, so one 60 kg shipment beats three 20 kg ones by a wide margin.
- How much does repacking save?
- On a bulky gift order, commonly 25–40% of chargeable weight. On dense goods it saves nothing, because they were never billing on volume.
- Can I get a firm price before ordering?
- A screening estimate, yes — the calculator on this site runs the same engine we quote with. The final number is billed on the warehouse's measured weight and dimensions, and anything overcharged comes back as credit.
Your next step
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