Consolidating from several suppliers: what breaks at the receiving end

A container fed by several factories has more places to go wrong than one with a single supplier. Most of it shows up on the day the goods are delivered, not on the day they are ordered.

We run a small warehouse in Shenzhen. Buyers and forwarders send their suppliers’ goods to us; we take them in, count them, open them, photograph them, label them, and hold them until the container is booked.

We keep the number of open shipments deliberately small. It means every carton is opened and counted by the same person who then writes to you.

The dates never line up

Factories quote lead time from the deposit, and the deposits go out on different days. Two suppliers both quoting 25 days may have started four days apart, so already they will not finish together. One late material order turns four days into three weeks.

When that happens there are only three moves, and all of them cost money: hold the early goods until the last one is ready, split the shipment and pay the fixed costs twice, or push the container back and tell the other end why. None of these is a mistake in itself. The mistake is discovering the gap two days before the cut-off.

What works is to fix the container cut-off date first and negotiate backwards with each supplier, and to ask for a photo of the finished cartons rather than the words “ready this week”.

What actually happens on delivery day

Goods arrive by van or by truck, sometimes four cartons, sometimes two pallets’ worth. The sequence is the same every time:

1. Unload — and look at the outside of every carton while doing it, because that is the only moment when you can honestly say a dent was there before you touched it.
2. Count against the packing list, carton by carton, not by counting the stack and multiplying.
3. Open and look, against whatever the buyer asked us to check. This is not a lab test.
4. Photograph: the carton label, the open carton, the goods themselves, and one wide shot of the whole consignment. With the date.
5. Label — replace or add the shipping marks and product labels the buyer specified.
6. Put away, and send the buyer the count, the photos and any difference the same day.

Step three needs a word of caution, because the word “inspection” gets used too loosely in this business. We are not a testing lab and we do not issue inspection reports. What we do is what the buyer asks for: check the outside, check the quantity, check the model or color on the label against the order, and photograph what we see. If a buyer needs AQL sampling with a certificate, that is a third-party job and we say so.

Two things that go wrong more than anything else

After a few months of small appliances, small furniture, toys, pet supplies, household goods and drinkware, two problems come up far more often than the rest.

One: cartons arrive damaged or damp. It is rarely a crushed pallet. It is one corner staved in, or a carton that sat on a wet floor somewhere before it reached us. Damage found on arrival can be photographed and reported while the supplier still has a chance to replace it. Damage found after the container is loaded cannot.

Two: the labels are wrong or missing. One supplier prints the shipping mark on A4 and tapes it on. Another writes it by hand. A third puts the product label inside the carton instead of on it. Sometimes the file the buyer sent was never forwarded to the factory at all, so the cartons carry the mark from the previous order. In a warehouse this is a sorting problem; at the destination it is a receiving problem; at customs it can be a document problem.

Both are cheap to catch and expensive to inherit. That is the whole argument for having someone count and open the goods before they go into the container, rather than after they come out of it.

Before you place the order

Ask every supplier for two prices: EXW, and FOB Shenzhen. The difference is what inland transport really costs, and it tells you whether the “free delivery to port” in their offer is free or already inside the unit price. It also settles, in advance, who is responsible when the goods are late to the port rather than late to leave the factory.

If you are weighing up whether a warehouse is the right one for your cargo, the limits and the storage terms are in the FAQ; the practical constraints of a small warehouse are in About.