Your goods leave the factory on pallets or in cartons, and from that moment they are handled by people you will never meet, in buildings you will never see. What arrives depends less on the freight rate than on two decisions taken early: whether the container is yours alone, and how carefully the goods were stuffed into it.
Volume against weight: the calculation that decides
Sea freight for a shared shipment is not billed on weight alone, nor on volume alone. The carrier compares the two under a conversion rule and charges on whichever comes out higher. Light and bulky goods pay on volume; dense and compact goods pay on weight. The rule itself should appear in the quotation — if it does not, ask for it, because it is the entire basis of the price.
Two practical consequences follow. First, packaging is a freight decision: a carton designed to protect the product may double the space it occupies, and you pay for that space on every shipment for years. Second, the crossover point is real — past a certain volume, a full container costs less than the same goods sent as a shared shipment, and the only way to know where that point sits on your route is to ask for both quotations, landed, on the same day.
FCL, LCL, groupage: what actually differs
| Option | How the goods travel | What you control | Where the cost hides |
|---|---|---|---|
| FCL, full container | Your goods alone, sealed at the factory or at a warehouse, opened at destination | The stuffing, the seal, and the fact that nobody handles your cartons in between | Unused space if you do not fill it, and the cost of unloading at your own premises |
| LCL, shared container | Consolidated with other shippers' goods, stuffed and stripped in warehouses at both ends | Very little once the goods reach the consolidation warehouse | Destination handling and deconsolidation charges, which are quoted separately or not at all |
| Groupage by a forwarder | The same physical journey as LCL, organised end to end by one operator | One counterpart who answers for the whole chain, which is worth more than it sounds | A schedule that waits for the consolidation to fill, and a margin that is not always visible |
What bad stuffing produces at the other end
A container is not a room: it moves, it rolls, it is lifted, and whatever is inside spends weeks being pushed against whatever is next to it. Goods loaded without bracing shift; loose cartons at the top collapse onto those below; heavy pallets placed above light ones crush them slowly. None of this is visible on a bill of lading, and all of it is visible when the doors open.
In a shared container the risk is different in nature. Your pallets travel beside goods you did not choose, stuffed by a warehouse that is optimising the whole container rather than protecting yours. That is not negligence; it is the job. It does mean that packaging strong enough to be handled several times is not a refinement in LCL — it is the condition for arriving intact.
- Photographs of the empty container before loading, showing the floor, the walls and the roof — leaks and damage are found here or not at all.
- Photographs at the start, at the halfway point and at the end of loading, so the stacking pattern is visible.
- A photograph of the closed doors showing the seal number, readable, and the same number on the documents.
- A packing list matching the photographs: cartons per pallet, pallets per container, marks visible on the outside.
- A written instruction on what may not be stacked on what, sent before loading rather than after a claim.
Ask for these before the container is sealed, not when a claim is being prepared. They cost the supplier a few minutes and they change what you can prove: without them, a damaged shipment becomes a conversation in which everyone is honest and nobody can demonstrate anything.
Why a shared container sometimes costs more than a full one
The sea leg of an LCL shipment is genuinely cheaper, and that is the number people compare. What the comparison leaves out is everything the shared shipment needs that a full container does not: consolidation at origin, deconsolidation at destination, warehouse handling, documentation per shipment, and customs formalities that are charged per consignment rather than per cubic metre.
Those destination charges are the ones that surprise, because they appear on an invoice that arrives after the goods, from a party you did not choose. They also scale badly: they are broadly the same whether you ship a little or a lot, so the more volume you move, the worse the shared option looks. Compare landed cost, door to door, including every destination line — not the freight rate on its own.
Ask both quotations in the same format, landed at the same address, on the same day, with every destination charge listed. The point is not to find the cheapest route once, but to learn where your own crossover sits — after which the decision takes a minute for every shipment that follows.
Two habits cover most of it. Design the packaging with the container in mind, because the space a carton wastes is paid for on every single shipment. And treat the stuffing as part of the product: it is the last operation performed on goods you have spent months getting right, and the only one nobody thinks to specify.