“Shipping from China costs X and takes Y days” is the kind of advice that sounds useful and is not. Four different services sit under that sentence, with cost structures that differ by an order of magnitude, and picking the wrong one is the most common way e-commerce sellers overspend on freight.

This article is about the decision, not the price list.

The four options, and what each one actually is

Cross-border parcel

Parcels travel as individual pieces on postal or commercial parcel networks. They are consolidated with other people’s parcels, scanned at network handover points, and delivered by a local postal or courier partner.

  • Cost structure: priced per parcel with a rate that falls as weight rises, up to a limit
  • Best for: individual customer orders, light goods, low-value items
  • Weakness: the widest variance in transit, and tracking can go quiet mid-transit when the parcel changes network

Express courier

Express moves parcels on dedicated courier networks with priority air handling and their own customs processes.

  • Cost structure: highest per kilogram of the four
  • Best for: shipments where the cost of waiting exceeds the freight premium
  • Weakness: on cheap products, the freight can exceed the product cost, which destroys margin

Air freight

Air freight moves consolidated commercial shipments on booked airline space. It is not a courier network — the shipment travels as cargo, usually on an air waybill covering the whole consignment.

  • Cost structure: priced per kilogram on chargeable weight, with a minimum charge per shipment
  • Best for: restocks and commercial volume that must move faster than sea
  • Weakness: there is a minimum sensible size; below it, express or parcel is cheaper

Ocean freight

Ocean freight moves containers. LCL shares container space with other cargo; FCL books a whole container.

  • Cost structure: lowest per unit at volume, plus local charges at both ends
  • Best for: planned replenishment, heavy or bulky goods, container-scale volume
  • Weakness: the slowest option, and the one that punishes late planning most

The question that decides it

Most shipments resolve to one question: what is the cost of the goods arriving later than this?

If the answer is “a few customers get impatient”, the cheapest tracked option that meets your promise is correct. If the answer is “we go out of stock and lose the listing ranking”, express is cheap at any price. If the answer is “we planned this restock two months ago”, ocean freight is the only rational choice.

Everything else is detail.

Chargeable weight, briefly

Air-priced services do not charge on the weight on the scale. They charge on chargeable weight: the greater of actual weight and volumetric weight, where volumetric weight is calculated from the carton dimensions.

That has a practical consequence people miss. Reducing the empty space inside a carton often cuts cost more than reducing the weight of the product, especially for light, bulky goods. Packaging advice is not a nice-to-have — it is a line item.

Where sellers overspend

Three patterns come up repeatedly.

Paying for express on planned replenishment. If the stock was ordered a month ago, express is buying speed you did not need. Booking earlier on a slower mode almost always beats paying a premium on a late booking.

Using parcel lines for heavy goods. Parcel rates rise steeply with weight. Once a parcel gets past a certain weight, per-kilogram freight starts winning — usually before sellers expect it.

Shipping customer orders by air freight. Air freight moves consignments, not individual orders. Using it for order-level fulfilment means you are paying for consolidation you then have to break up at the destination.

Doing it the other way round

If you already know your deadline and your cargo profile, the question becomes: which services can actually hit that deadline at a sane cost? That is a comparison, and it needs real numbers — package count, carton dimensions, weight, destination.

Send those and we will price the options that fit, with the current expected transit windows for each. If one of them is obviously wrong for your cargo, we will say so rather than quote it to make the list look longer.