Reasons to use a shipping company and not the shipping provided by the store
How a package forwarding company can help you save on your international purchase from the U.S.
There are several benefits of using a package forwarding company like OPAS. While you might save money by shopping online in the USA, having stores ship to you directly might begin to eat into your savings. Why is that? There are two main reasons.
Consolidation
Stores won’t consolidate for you. If you shop in multiple stores within a relatively short period, let’s say a couple of weeks, we will consolidate all your purchases from multiple stores into a single shipment to reduce international shipping costs. You will save a lot of your money by the consolidation alone.
Let’s say you shop in five different online stores. You buy one shirt on Amazon, a pair of glasses on Michael Kors, a sweatshirt on GAP, four T-shirts on Guess, and a pair of shoes on Zappos. There will be at least five packages coming to your home. It will often also mean that you will be dealing with Customs at least five times. If you use consolidation services, you will reduce the time to only once. Read here about the advantages of consolidation.
Moreover, you will often get multiple packages even if you shop in one store only. It happens all the time. Online retailers regularly send one purchase in multiple shipments. See this real-life example from one of our purchases we made on behalf of one of our members with our Personal Shopper service.
Packing
The stores are often not very good at packing.
While it is okay for domestic shipping within the USA, it may not be suitable and safe for international shipping. In the latter case, the package is on the way much longer, and there are a lot more people and machines handling the package, and thus, a much greater risk the merchandise will be damaged.
Another issue with packing in the USA is the size of the boxes. There are hundreds of different sizes of boxes. Having too many different sizes in the warehouse is inconvenient and takes up too much space. Also, for people who pack the shipments, looking for the right box size is time-consuming and, thus, inefficient. Time is money, after all.
To speed up the packing process, the stores use only a few most common, standard sizes of boxes. Since they primarily ship domestically within the USA only, they do not need to worry about dimensional weight. While this approach makes packing fast and convenient for them, in international shipping, unused space means bigger dimensional weight, thus higher shipping costs.
So how can a company like OPAS help you?
OPAS is a shipping company. Shipping is our primary business. The more we help you to save on international shipping, the more happy and loyal to us you will be. So we do our best to pack very well.
We do carry a large number of boxes of different sizes. OPAS also takes the time to try and find the right boxes for your shipments. OPAS invests its time in both finding the right boxes and packing as well and efficiently as possible.
To help you with the consolidation of all your purchases, our team provides 30 days of free storage. So you have enough time to do all your shopping and ship only when you are ready to ship one larger consolidated shipment.
How does it work?
When you submit your request to consolidate and ship, we take all your packages, unpack from the original boxes used by the merchant, and discard all of the extra boxes and packing material.
Then OPAS finds the boxes which are closest to the volume of your purchases. OPAS places all your items into as few boxes as possible, so we use as little space as possible. Our team packs very carefully, too; adding padding when necessary, so your items will be safe and will not arrive damaged. Once OPAS consolidates, our team measures and weighs the new packages and puts this one consolidated shipment in the system so that you can see it in your account. You pay a very reasonable price for one shipment only, and OPAS ships it to you. Simple as that.
