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Lane 01 · Air
Air freight from China to Europe, in three to five days.
Shanghai to Amsterdam on a direct flight, then door to door — customs cleared, duty and import VAT paid. Priced on chargeable weight, with the tax lines shown separately, so you can see what is carriage and what is duty.
- Transit
- 3–5 days
- Route
- PVG → AMS direct
- Basis
- Chargeable kg
- From
- 30 kg
- Cleared as
- Importer of record
- Quote
- Within 24h
The five days
What the transit time is actually made of.
A quoted transit figure hides four steps. Here they are separately, so you can see where the days go and where they can slip.
| Step | Days | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Collection | 0–1 | Pickup at your supplier, consolidation at our warehouse, export declaration filed. |
| Uplift | 1 | Shanghai Pudong to Amsterdam Schiphol, direct. No hub connection — which is a large part of why the door-to-door figure holds at three to five days. |
| Clearance | 1–2 | Import declaration filed at Amsterdam in our name, duty and VAT settled. Add a day if the consignment is selected for examination. |
| Delivery | 1–2 | Final leg by courier, oversized handling or truck, as quoted, with a signed POD. |
After Amsterdam
What happens between the aircraft and your door.
Arrival is the middle of the job, not the end. Three things happen after the wheels stop, and the last one has more than one possible answer.
| Stage | Time | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Import clearance | 0–1 day | Filed by our own customs broker in Europe, in our name, with duty and import VAT settled. The entry is not waiting behind a third party’s queue. |
| Breakdown | Same day | The consignment is broken down from the air pallet, counted, and split by destination before it is released for delivery. |
| Last mile | 1–3 days | Courier, oversized, or truck — whichever the cargo actually needs. The option is named on the quote, not left to the driver’s judgement. |
UPS or FedEx
Parcels and cartons, tracked, normally next day inside the destination country. The default for replenishment and spare parts.
Oversized
Single items a parcel network will not take — long goods, machinery, furniture. Quoted per case with the handling method named.
Truck
Pallets and full loads on a booked day, to a dock or a named address. Cheaper per pallet than courier once the volume justifies it.
When a consignment is selected for examination, the file does not travel between companies. The people who filed the entry are the people who deal with the query — which is usually the difference between losing a day and losing a week.
The price
Six lines, and only one of them is negotiable.
| Line | How it is set |
|---|---|
| Air freight | Chargeable weight × rate for the lane. Chargeable weight is the greater of actual weight and volumetric weight (L × W × H in cm ÷ 6000). |
| Fuel and security | Set by the airline, moves weekly. Baked into the kilo rate we quote, not added afterwards. |
| Export declaration | Fixed per shipment. |
| Import clearance | Fixed per entry, in our name as importer of record. |
| Duty | From the HS code and the declared value. Shown as its own line, never folded into the kilo rate. |
| Import VAT | Destination member state rate — 19% in Germany, 20% in France, 21% in the Netherlands, 22% in Italy, 21% in Spain, 23% in Poland. |
There is no public rate card, because a rate card is either out of date or padded to stay safe. Send the five details and you get the real number within one business day.
Fit
What belongs on a plane, and what does not.
Flies well
- Traditional trade orders — repeat B2B shipments where a missed delivery date costs you a customer, not just a sale
- A bestseller running dry mid-cycle: the SKU selling faster than road or sea stock can refill it
- Anything with a season, a launch date or a promotion attached to it
- Goods where freight is a small share of the landed value, so speed comes cheap
Needs checking first
- Lithium cells and power banks — class, watt-hours, operator acceptance
- Liquids, aerosols, powders and magnets
- Products needing CE marking, WEEE registration or packaging registration (Germany’s LUCID register) — that is the seller’s obligation, not the forwarder’s
- Anything below 30 kg, where a courier product usually beats a booked air shipment on cost
Before you book
What we need from you.
Paperwork
Commercial invoice and packing list. The invoice value is the duty base, so it has to be the real transaction value — not a number that makes the duty look better.
Product detail
Specific enough to classify: what it is made of and what it does. "Plastic parts" gets a question back; "ABS injection-moulded housing for a coffee machine" gets a code.
Destination
Postcode for a business or residential address, or the Amazon facility code. Remote-area and timed-delivery surcharges depend on this line.
Questions
Four things people ask about air freight.
Is the three to five days guaranteed?
No. Any forwarder who says otherwise is writing a promise they cannot keep. Three to five days is a planning figure built from the flight we book, the clearance queue and your delivery address. What we do commit to is telling you the same day when something moves — a missed uplift, a customs query, a delivery slot refused.
Do we need an EORI number or a VAT registration?
Not with our standard DDP setup. The import declaration is filed in our name, so the trader identifier and the VAT deferment sit with us. If your company holds an EU VAT number and wants to reclaim the import VAT, the entry has to be in your name — tell us before we quote and we will price it VAT-exclusive instead.
What happens if customs selects the shipment for inspection?
The airline or the handling agent moves the consignment to a customs facility and the clock stops while it is examined. Examination fees and any storage beyond the free days are outside a DDP quote — we notify you the same day with the fee before authorising it, rather than adding it to the invoice later.
Can you fly batteries, liquids or aerosols?
Sometimes. It depends on the cell chemistry, the watt-hour rating, the packaging and whether the operator accepts the class. Send the product spec before you book; a mistaken declaration is the most expensive way to learn that a shipment was not air-eligible.