6 Reasons Sharing a Container Beats Owning One
From inventory and cash flow to CBP inspections, our Sales Account Manager, Paul Hinschberger, breaks it down in video here. 🎥
Read the transcription:
“At Elysia and Co. we specialize in wine shipping logistics. One of the most valuable offerings that we have is LCL shipping, or less than container load, basically just meaning that you don't have to fill up your own container. You share space with other clients of ours, sharing that cost. But, it comes with some benefits that might surprise you.
Benefit 1: Inventory and timing
With a full container, you're waiting on all of your supplies to be ready before a container moves, so you might be out of stock on one supplier while waiting for other things to be ready. With LCL it just ships as you're ready. Your shelves stay stocked and you're not losing sales.
Benefit 2: Cash flow
A full container means paying all of your suppliers at once, paying a huge tariff bill all at once, paying all your taxes all at once, and that can tie up some cash flow that you might need for various other bills that you might be paying. With LCL, it breaks up into smaller chunks, smaller tariff payments. You're not bleeding all your cash at once and slowly trickling it back in.
Benefit 3: Closeout risk
Over-ordering can be a real problem. If you bring in more wine than you actually need and then you're not selling it until the next summer and you have to do it at the closeout, you're making way less margin than you normally would, and you were also incurring all those warehouse costs in the meantime.
Benefit 4: CBP inspections
Here's one most people do not think about: If your full container gets pulled for a CBP inspection, even if it's with us, that cost actually gets passed on to you. With LCL, we absorb that cost ourselves, which is just one added benefit. That can be thousands of dollars of savings right there.
Benefit 5: Customs bond
This is more of one just working with us in general. Doing your own shipping, you have to have a Customs bond with the CBP. With us, you don't have to have that. That's at least $500 a year for smaller importers, and it goes up from there if you're doing quite a lot of volume.
Benefit 6: Time and effort
This is really what it all boils down to: what do you want to be spending your time doing, selling wine or doing logistics? With us, we take care of all the messy stuff so you don't have to. You can get back to what you do the best.
In conclusion, you make the magic and we manage the maze.
