Using a Sea Freight Forwarder from China to Australia

[prime.gadgets]

Does anyone have experience in using Sea Freight Forwarder to import from China to Australia?

Some items are not practical to import via Air Express. I have seen many Sea Freight Forwarders listed in Alibaba who deliver orders DDP to Australia. But not sure how the process works;

01) How they collect the order from the seller in China?

02) How they handle import duties and deliver DDP?

If anyone already using these services, can you please share your experience with newbies..

Many thanks in advance..

[brerrabbit585]

have you googled to see if you can find out anything? Not too many people will want to give away their secrets here.

[prime.gadgets]

There are lots of information related to Air Freight Forwarding on google and youtube, but very few in Sea Freight Forwarders. Search "Sea Freight Forwarder to Australia" on Alibaba. But what I want to know is are they trustworthy and how to handle them?

I honestly did not think that it would be a trade secret. I recently asked about good packaging suppliers and many ppl here helped me with good recommendations and it helped me lot. 

[lyndal1838]

Depending on how you are paying, if you use paypal you will not have any buyer protection.   Paypal deems the surface shipping to be too slow to qualify for protection.

[prime.gadgets]

I'm not using paypal. But using services via Alibaba, so have the Trade Assurance

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@lyndal1838 wrote:

Depending on how you are paying, if you use paypal you will not have any buyer protection.   Paypal deems the surface shipping to be too slow to qualify for protection.

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[south.coffee]

If you are using Alibaba (not AliExpress), the Chinese seller can organise shipping accordingly.  Many will quote FOB - freight on board or door to door and will already have a preferred outbound shipper.  I find Alibaba suppliers have it down pat.  Don't worry too much about the cost ex China, we seafreight quantity orders up to 20kg boxes for $3/kg door to door.  Airfreight $9/kg.

Australia Post has a logistics partner in China which organises everything to the local Australian mail centre with Australia Post doing the 'last mile'.  This is one of many forwarders the Chinese eBay sellers use for 'drop shipping' and consolidation shipping.

http://en.saichenglogistics.com/