How to avoid extra shipping fees in the middle of a peak season

Before each major holiday, the shipping industry struggles to adjust to the increase in demand of products. This occurs on a yearly basis, due to the fact that stores want to make sure their products are available to the eager customers who want to buy them.

In those periods of high demand we speak of “peak season”. Due to the demand, carries charge a special fee, called “the peak season surcharge”. This is only applied to import from Asia.

Major peak seasons are:

• Fall start of the school or academic year until Black Friday and Cyber Monday
• Chinese New Year

Buy products early

A way to avoid the peak season surcharge is to order products before the peak season starts. If you can buy the products earlier, do not wait until the peak season. Of course you may need some extra storage and hold on to the items longer than normal, but it may save you a lot of money as well.

If possible try to avoid transshipment, because your container may be rolled twice. That means you may have to spend extra money on extra surcharges.

Anticipate

Finally it may not be possible to buy product a lot earlier than the peak season. In either case it may be good to just keep in mind the hurdles you may face during peak season and to anticipate those in terms of planning and calculating your prices. At Dutch Container Merchants we have a lot of experts working in the field of buying, sealing and leasing containers and who can inform you about upcoming peak seasons and other bottlenecks that you may want to take into account.