Common Tricks of Unreliable Freight Forwarders for Air Freight to Middle East – Avoid These Pitfalls
In the cross-border logistics industry, when you ship via air freight to Middle East, unreliable forwarders have all kinds of tricks you can hardly imagine. This article will reveal the most common scams during air freight to Middle East so you won’t fall for them.
1. Hiding Sensitive Goods Under Regular Cargo
Some forwarders offer very low prices, but they only use your regular goods to cover sensitive items such as anti-dumping products, prohibited goods, cigarettes and more.
These forwarders mainly profit from sensitive cargo. Your shipping cost seems low, but the risk is huge. If anything goes wrong, the forwarder will take no responsibility at all.
2. Switching Air Freight to Sea Freight, or Fast Shipping to Slow Shipping for Extra Profit
When you wonder why your goods are delayed, they always make up excuses: worker strikes, customs inspection, high-temperature weight limits, etc.
The real reason is they changed your shipping method to earn the price difference.
3. Low Initial Quote but High Hidden Charges
They first attract you with an extremely low price. After you send the goods, you will find many extra fees on the bill.
If you don’t have much experience with freight forwarders, you can easily get ripped off.
There was also a practice called “sending to a nearby warehouse instead of the distant one” on Amazon. Although this no longer exists due to system updates, you should still stay away from forwarders who did this before.
Many sellers have fallen into these traps when using air freight to Middle East. We also experienced similar problems when we first started cross-border e-commerce.
When choosing a freight forwarder, don’t only look at the price.
You should also consider the company’s strength, industry reputation, years of experience and other factors.
Take our company DL as an example:
We are among the top 5 companies for air freight to Middle East. Even Huawei uses our service for their project cargo. We once shipped electronic products worth 40 million RMB for them.
Most forwarders are just small offices in urban villages with only one desk.
Even experienced forwarders with over 10 years in business only get 2 to 3 board spaces per week from airlines.
But DL has exclusive 20 board spaces every week from 2 major airlines – 10 times the capacity of those small forwarders.
Many competitors look similar to us, but they dare not buy exclusive board spaces simply because they don’t have enough cargo volume.