Hello everyone My name is Carder, and I don't like to pay too much. Surely many people have heard about companies that send parcels, through which you can order things from American online stores. This spring, I managed to visit the warehouse of one of these companies, and today I will tell you how it works.
Let's assume that you don't want to overpay stores that are lobbying for a reduction in the customs limit, or that you simply can't buy something in your country. In this case, companies will come to your aid and kindly accept your parcel, repackage or combine several of them into one to reduce weight and cost, and send them to your home. Registration for many companies begins with the tempting words "Get an address in the USA". In fact, the client does not receive any separate address, they are simply told the warehouse address and add an account ID to it in order to determine which customer received the parcel, not by last name and first name, but by a unique number. The address that the user receives looks something like this:
123 Anywhere street
Unit 239
Some City, Delaware, 10001
It is worth noting that each customer is not allocated a separate place in the warehouse, and "Unit 239" is just numbers without reference to any specific space (to say that you have a cell in a warehouse in the United States, in this case, will not be entirely correct), so the company has customers it can be very large — the main thing is that all the packages can fit at the moment.
There are quite a few forwarding companies, and they all have different conditions. For example, there are companies that charge extra money for processing each parcel, and there are those that need to buy insurance from them. So I recommend that you carefully read the working conditions before choosing one. Below are the minimum prices and conditions for some companies (delivery from the USA to Moscow of a parcel with a minimum price and a parcel weighing 1 kg).
After receiving the address on the website of the delivery company, you can immediately place an order in the online store. Almost always, online stores ask you to specify the so — called billing address in addition to the delivery address-the address where the cardholder lives. This is a kind of fraud protection, because if someone steals your card, in most cases it will be impossible to determine where the owner lives, so the bank may reject such a transaction. In practice, with Russian bank cards, you can specify any address, and the payment will be successful, so if you can't choose a country other than the United States on the online store's website, you can try to specify any address. However, very often companies that send parcels are asked not to specify the warehouse address as a billing address.
The headache of such companies is carders who steal card data and order parcels to the warehouse and then send them to themselves. All the secrets of fighting them were not revealed to me, but one of the characteristic features is the American name indicated in the account. It is unlikely that an American will need to order a parcel to a warehouse in the United States for its further shipment to Russia, so such names are often paid attention to.
It is worth noting that almost all the warehouses of mail carriers are located in one state — Delaware. I will not open America if I say that any price that you see in stores is not the final price, but the "net" price that the store will receive. In almost all cases (except, for example, clothing or food in some states), a sales tax is added, which can reach up to 9%. The choice of Delaware is quite simple to explain — there is no sales tax in this state, so nothing will be added to the cost of any parcel that is delivered to the warehouse in this state. For example, if you want to buy the twelfth 128 GB iPhone for $ 1000 (conditional) and deliver it to Delaware, you will pay exactly $ 1000, while in New York you will need to give up to 1000 * 1.08875 = $1088.75 (even within the same state, depending on the district, taxes may vary slightly).
So, after you have placed an order in one of the store's logistics centers, its assembly begins. If an order consists of several items, it may well be divided into two or more parcels, since all the items you ordered may not be available in the same warehouse. After packaging, a shipping label is pasted on the parcel — a transport label with the tracking number, recipient's name, address and other information, and then the parcel is sent to the carrier. There are not so many major carriers in the United States: US state Post, USP, FedEx, DHL (although I have never received a parcel sent from the United States by this courier service). There are still not very large companies that do not have a very large" coverage area " (for example, LaserShip), and their own delivery services, which the giants Amazon and Walmart have.
By and large, the user doesn't care what their parcel was sent to, and, as a rule, it is impossible to choose a courier service.Most often, they offer only various options for accelerated delivery such as two-day or next business day delivery.
The standard shipping cost for many online stores is $5.99, but almost all have a purchase amount after which delivery will become free. For example, for Amazon, it's $ 25, and for Walmart, it's $ 35. So if you put $ 23 worth of items in the Amazon shopping cart, it's more profitable to buy something else for $ 2 than pay $ 6 for delivery (keep in mind that this additional item can increase the total weight of the parcel, and the mail carrier can charge extra money). If you don't pay for expedited delivery, the parcel will be delivered on average in a week. Naturally, the time frame is always different and depends on the distance of the parcel and other factors, but in most cases you should not expect that the parcel will arrive the next day or the next day, if it was not paid additionally. An exception to this rule is Walmart, where many products are delivered for free within two days.
At the last stage, parcels are loaded into the car and delivered by courier to the final addresses. A distinctive feature of the work of state mail and courier services in the United States is that parcels are delivered directly to your home, that is, you do not need to go to the post office or courier office, fill out a notification, etc. In addition, they are left at the door if no one is home, or given to anyone who lives at the delivery address, so there are never any problems with receiving parcels from warehouses — they just give them everything that came to a specific address. Are there any problems with this approach? Yes, there are cases, for example, when a parcel can be stolen if you are not at home, but this happens very rarely, so it is easier for courier services to reimburse the cost of the parcel, and it is easier for stores to send the parcel again than for each person to sign for receiving it. Some online stores can deliver a parcel under signature, but this is not very common, and usually in cases where the order amount is large enough.
Shipping prices for all companies are quite different, so before choosing such a service, it is better to understand how much weight the ordered items will have, and calculate the approximate amount using calculators. There is a small disadvantage here: until the parcel is processed in the warehouse, the final cost is unknown: you can know the approximate or exact weight of items, but when sending them, the forwarders take into account the total weight of the parcel, including packaging and protective materials, so if the item weighs 800 grams, you can safely add 200 grams of packaging to it.
The warehouse I visited looks like this from the outside:
A delivery service car pulls in through one of the doors and unloads all the packages that have arrived for that day. Depending on the volume, parcels can simply be unloaded or delivered in huge boxes. For example, the US state Post Office delivers parcels in such containers:
The warehouse is only open on weekdays, so sometimes couriers try to deliver an order after business hours. There are times when they climb over the fence (but in this case, the alarm goes off and they quickly run away) or they just throw packages over the fence. For example, like this:
Inside, the warehouse looks quite simple: racks with parcels and nothing superfluous.
The warehouse I visited receives about 1,000 parcels a day. According to the owner, this is not much, and they are ready to process much larger volumes without compromising time or quality. The peak of the number of parcels was in 2014 before the fall of the ruble exchange rate — then about 3,000 parcels were received per day.
After a parcel arrives, it goes through several steps before being sent to the final recipient. The tracking number of the parcel is scanned, weighed, and photographed. An important caveat: if the user specified the tracking number of an incoming parcel in their merchant profile, then after it is scanned, it immediately goes to the user's merchant profile, and you can perform additional manipulations with it, for example, ask them to take photos of the contents or check the functionality of the equipment. If the tracking number is not found among those specified by users, then the client is searched for just by the number specified in the address that was assigned during registration. By the way, some delivery services now offer an economical option for delivering your parcels: if you added a tracking number to your account before the parcel arrives at the warehouse, then your parcel can be queued for shipment immediately after it arrives-without storing it in the warehouse or repacking it. In this case, users can save money, and for mail carriers, you can save resources: you don't need to put the parcel on a storage shelf, search for it when the user decides to send it, and repack it. An important caveat is that your parcel will almost always be opened and checked that the contents correspond to what is indicated in the declaration, since the forwarders are responsible for what they send.
If the user chose to send the parcel immediately, then everything is simple: a new mail label is printed, and the parcel goes to the queue for the next shipment. Otherwise, an internal number with a barcode is pasted on the parcel, and it is sent to the shelf waiting for further action.
In the warehouse where I was, several colors are used for such labels. When an employee comes to look for a parcel on a specific shelf, they know that they need to find a label of a specific color, and in this case the search is much faster. After the parcel is found, the barcode is scanned to avoid errors.
By the way, the warehouse is now implementing an automatic feed that will process incoming parcels: a person will put the parcels, and then everything will happen automatically: weighing, photographing, reading the barcode. The only thing that the tape cannot do is paste barcodes, so human participation is always required, but the labor costs are incomparably less than with manual processing, and the speed of work is many times higher.
Then the user can give a command to send this package, or wait for one or more packages to arrive and combine them into one to save money. In both cases, when the user forms a request for shipment, specially trained people search for packages ordered by the user in the warehouse and take them to the packaging.
When repacking, the following happens: if there is only one package, then most often they will simply put a transport label on it, and if there are several packages, they will be opened, combined into one, weighed and also put on the label. After that, the parcel is packed in a large box, which will go to the airport. There are always several boxes, depending on which courier service the parcel will go to: it can be Russian Post, Boxberry, SDEC, and others.
A curious fact: when packing parcels, almost never use ordinary scotch tape. As practice shows, it is not very reliable. Instead, an automatic machine is used, which produces reinforced adhesive tape. At the touch of a button, a tape of the specified length is released from the machine (the numbers on the machine are the length of the tape in inches). The tape is warmed up so that the glue is better docked to the box.
Most often, parcels leave according to a specially agreed schedule a couple of times a week, so do not expect that as soon as your parcel is packed, it will immediately go to you. The choice of Delaware is also due to the fact that New York is only a couple of hours away, and there is one of the largest cargo hubs in the United States. In most cases, parcels are flown by regular passenger planes. For example, there are direct flights to Moscow from Aeroflot, and the parcel will fly along with the passengers ' luggage. Parcels can also fly with a transfer through European cities or arrive in Helsinki at the Russian Post hub (yes, Russian Post has a hub not in Russia), and then cross the border by land transport from there.
When sending a parcel, the user always fills out a customs declaration. After arrival, all parcels pass through customs, and in this case, a situation may arise when the user will need to pay customs duty. Currently, the duty-free limit for parcels to Russia is 200 euros or 31 kg per parcel to one person (but if several parcels arrived to the same person on the same day, then customs considers all such parcels as a single whole, so you need to send parcels on different days with a short break). However, you can always send two different packages to two different recipients to avoid paying the fee. If the customs limit is not exceeded, you do not need to pay anything, and the parcel is sent to the courier service for delivery to the client. Otherwise, the customer will have to pay a customs fee: currently it is 15% of the excess value or 2 euros for each kilogram of excess weight. Usually, the payment operation is not a big problem: the forwarders are customs agents and you can pay the duty directly through them, so there should be no difficulties here. After paying the fee, the parcel is also sent to the courier service.
Mail carriers have another problem: a large amount of packaging remains from incoming parcels, so huge presses come to the rescue, which crush the boxes for further processing.
As the owner told me pochtoy.com He started shipping packages quite a long time ago — in 2007, he won a green card and moved to Pittsburgh from Minsk. On one of the forums, he was asked to send skates from the United States, and then he earned his first 30 dollars on this. In the future, the number of such orders increased, and over time this part-time job turned into a big business.
In conclusion, I want to note that from the outside, the work of such companies does not look like something complicated: I accepted the parcel, repacked it and sent it on, although in fact it is not so easy, and there are many nuances in this business. Choosing an intermediary for sending should be approached very responsibly, since when delivering your goods, there is an additional link that performs a rather important role. You should not pay attention to the theft of parcels, since warehouses are most often hung with cameras, and it is quite difficult to do this (but I would still recommend reading reviews before starting work), but I would take a closer look at the time of parcel processing and the quality of packaging, since some intermediaries can save on packaging and storage costs to reduce the cost. protective materials or handle parcels for a very long time.
Let's assume that you don't want to overpay stores that are lobbying for a reduction in the customs limit, or that you simply can't buy something in your country. In this case, companies will come to your aid and kindly accept your parcel, repackage or combine several of them into one to reduce weight and cost, and send them to your home. Registration for many companies begins with the tempting words "Get an address in the USA". In fact, the client does not receive any separate address, they are simply told the warehouse address and add an account ID to it in order to determine which customer received the parcel, not by last name and first name, but by a unique number. The address that the user receives looks something like this:
123 Anywhere street
Unit 239
Some City, Delaware, 10001
It is worth noting that each customer is not allocated a separate place in the warehouse, and "Unit 239" is just numbers without reference to any specific space (to say that you have a cell in a warehouse in the United States, in this case, will not be entirely correct), so the company has customers it can be very large — the main thing is that all the packages can fit at the moment.
There are quite a few forwarding companies, and they all have different conditions. For example, there are companies that charge extra money for processing each parcel, and there are those that need to buy insurance from them. So I recommend that you carefully read the working conditions before choosing one. Below are the minimum prices and conditions for some companies (delivery from the USA to Moscow of a parcel with a minimum price and a parcel weighing 1 kg).
Company | Minimum cost | Minimum price per 1 kg | Insurance | Receiving a parcel to a warehouse |
| $6.99 for 0.5 kg | $10.99 | From $3 | Is free |
| $9.50 for 0.453 kg | $21.50 | Free for packages up to $100 | Is free |
| $9.50 for 0.1 kg | $16.99 | 2% of the total cost of content and delivery | Is free |
| $11.64 for 0.2 kg | $24.82 | From 3% of the content price | Is free |
| $11.99 for 0.5 kg | $17.99 | Required (starting from $3) | Is free |
| $12.73 for 0.455 kg | $17.95 | Is free | $0.35 |
| $12.99 for 0.4 kg | $24.99 | Optional | From $3 |
| $13.55 for 0.4 kg | $28.18 | Optional | From $2 |
| $16.36 for 0.454 kg | $20.45 | Optional | Is free |
| $19.25 per 1 kg | $19.25 | Free for packages up to $100 | Is free |
After receiving the address on the website of the delivery company, you can immediately place an order in the online store. Almost always, online stores ask you to specify the so — called billing address in addition to the delivery address-the address where the cardholder lives. This is a kind of fraud protection, because if someone steals your card, in most cases it will be impossible to determine where the owner lives, so the bank may reject such a transaction. In practice, with Russian bank cards, you can specify any address, and the payment will be successful, so if you can't choose a country other than the United States on the online store's website, you can try to specify any address. However, very often companies that send parcels are asked not to specify the warehouse address as a billing address.
The headache of such companies is carders who steal card data and order parcels to the warehouse and then send them to themselves. All the secrets of fighting them were not revealed to me, but one of the characteristic features is the American name indicated in the account. It is unlikely that an American will need to order a parcel to a warehouse in the United States for its further shipment to Russia, so such names are often paid attention to.
It is worth noting that almost all the warehouses of mail carriers are located in one state — Delaware. I will not open America if I say that any price that you see in stores is not the final price, but the "net" price that the store will receive. In almost all cases (except, for example, clothing or food in some states), a sales tax is added, which can reach up to 9%. The choice of Delaware is quite simple to explain — there is no sales tax in this state, so nothing will be added to the cost of any parcel that is delivered to the warehouse in this state. For example, if you want to buy the twelfth 128 GB iPhone for $ 1000 (conditional) and deliver it to Delaware, you will pay exactly $ 1000, while in New York you will need to give up to 1000 * 1.08875 = $1088.75 (even within the same state, depending on the district, taxes may vary slightly).
So, after you have placed an order in one of the store's logistics centers, its assembly begins. If an order consists of several items, it may well be divided into two or more parcels, since all the items you ordered may not be available in the same warehouse. After packaging, a shipping label is pasted on the parcel — a transport label with the tracking number, recipient's name, address and other information, and then the parcel is sent to the carrier. There are not so many major carriers in the United States: US state Post, USP, FedEx, DHL (although I have never received a parcel sent from the United States by this courier service). There are still not very large companies that do not have a very large" coverage area " (for example, LaserShip), and their own delivery services, which the giants Amazon and Walmart have.
By and large, the user doesn't care what their parcel was sent to, and, as a rule, it is impossible to choose a courier service.Most often, they offer only various options for accelerated delivery such as two-day or next business day delivery.
The standard shipping cost for many online stores is $5.99, but almost all have a purchase amount after which delivery will become free. For example, for Amazon, it's $ 25, and for Walmart, it's $ 35. So if you put $ 23 worth of items in the Amazon shopping cart, it's more profitable to buy something else for $ 2 than pay $ 6 for delivery (keep in mind that this additional item can increase the total weight of the parcel, and the mail carrier can charge extra money). If you don't pay for expedited delivery, the parcel will be delivered on average in a week. Naturally, the time frame is always different and depends on the distance of the parcel and other factors, but in most cases you should not expect that the parcel will arrive the next day or the next day, if it was not paid additionally. An exception to this rule is Walmart, where many products are delivered for free within two days.
At the last stage, parcels are loaded into the car and delivered by courier to the final addresses. A distinctive feature of the work of state mail and courier services in the United States is that parcels are delivered directly to your home, that is, you do not need to go to the post office or courier office, fill out a notification, etc. In addition, they are left at the door if no one is home, or given to anyone who lives at the delivery address, so there are never any problems with receiving parcels from warehouses — they just give them everything that came to a specific address. Are there any problems with this approach? Yes, there are cases, for example, when a parcel can be stolen if you are not at home, but this happens very rarely, so it is easier for courier services to reimburse the cost of the parcel, and it is easier for stores to send the parcel again than for each person to sign for receiving it. Some online stores can deliver a parcel under signature, but this is not very common, and usually in cases where the order amount is large enough.
Shipping prices for all companies are quite different, so before choosing such a service, it is better to understand how much weight the ordered items will have, and calculate the approximate amount using calculators. There is a small disadvantage here: until the parcel is processed in the warehouse, the final cost is unknown: you can know the approximate or exact weight of items, but when sending them, the forwarders take into account the total weight of the parcel, including packaging and protective materials, so if the item weighs 800 grams, you can safely add 200 grams of packaging to it.
The warehouse I visited looks like this from the outside:
A delivery service car pulls in through one of the doors and unloads all the packages that have arrived for that day. Depending on the volume, parcels can simply be unloaded or delivered in huge boxes. For example, the US state Post Office delivers parcels in such containers:
The warehouse is only open on weekdays, so sometimes couriers try to deliver an order after business hours. There are times when they climb over the fence (but in this case, the alarm goes off and they quickly run away) or they just throw packages over the fence. For example, like this:
Inside, the warehouse looks quite simple: racks with parcels and nothing superfluous.
The warehouse I visited receives about 1,000 parcels a day. According to the owner, this is not much, and they are ready to process much larger volumes without compromising time or quality. The peak of the number of parcels was in 2014 before the fall of the ruble exchange rate — then about 3,000 parcels were received per day.
After a parcel arrives, it goes through several steps before being sent to the final recipient. The tracking number of the parcel is scanned, weighed, and photographed. An important caveat: if the user specified the tracking number of an incoming parcel in their merchant profile, then after it is scanned, it immediately goes to the user's merchant profile, and you can perform additional manipulations with it, for example, ask them to take photos of the contents or check the functionality of the equipment. If the tracking number is not found among those specified by users, then the client is searched for just by the number specified in the address that was assigned during registration. By the way, some delivery services now offer an economical option for delivering your parcels: if you added a tracking number to your account before the parcel arrives at the warehouse, then your parcel can be queued for shipment immediately after it arrives-without storing it in the warehouse or repacking it. In this case, users can save money, and for mail carriers, you can save resources: you don't need to put the parcel on a storage shelf, search for it when the user decides to send it, and repack it. An important caveat is that your parcel will almost always be opened and checked that the contents correspond to what is indicated in the declaration, since the forwarders are responsible for what they send.
If the user chose to send the parcel immediately, then everything is simple: a new mail label is printed, and the parcel goes to the queue for the next shipment. Otherwise, an internal number with a barcode is pasted on the parcel, and it is sent to the shelf waiting for further action.
In the warehouse where I was, several colors are used for such labels. When an employee comes to look for a parcel on a specific shelf, they know that they need to find a label of a specific color, and in this case the search is much faster. After the parcel is found, the barcode is scanned to avoid errors.
By the way, the warehouse is now implementing an automatic feed that will process incoming parcels: a person will put the parcels, and then everything will happen automatically: weighing, photographing, reading the barcode. The only thing that the tape cannot do is paste barcodes, so human participation is always required, but the labor costs are incomparably less than with manual processing, and the speed of work is many times higher.
Then the user can give a command to send this package, or wait for one or more packages to arrive and combine them into one to save money. In both cases, when the user forms a request for shipment, specially trained people search for packages ordered by the user in the warehouse and take them to the packaging.
When repacking, the following happens: if there is only one package, then most often they will simply put a transport label on it, and if there are several packages, they will be opened, combined into one, weighed and also put on the label. After that, the parcel is packed in a large box, which will go to the airport. There are always several boxes, depending on which courier service the parcel will go to: it can be Russian Post, Boxberry, SDEC, and others.
A curious fact: when packing parcels, almost never use ordinary scotch tape. As practice shows, it is not very reliable. Instead, an automatic machine is used, which produces reinforced adhesive tape. At the touch of a button, a tape of the specified length is released from the machine (the numbers on the machine are the length of the tape in inches). The tape is warmed up so that the glue is better docked to the box.
Most often, parcels leave according to a specially agreed schedule a couple of times a week, so do not expect that as soon as your parcel is packed, it will immediately go to you. The choice of Delaware is also due to the fact that New York is only a couple of hours away, and there is one of the largest cargo hubs in the United States. In most cases, parcels are flown by regular passenger planes. For example, there are direct flights to Moscow from Aeroflot, and the parcel will fly along with the passengers ' luggage. Parcels can also fly with a transfer through European cities or arrive in Helsinki at the Russian Post hub (yes, Russian Post has a hub not in Russia), and then cross the border by land transport from there.
When sending a parcel, the user always fills out a customs declaration. After arrival, all parcels pass through customs, and in this case, a situation may arise when the user will need to pay customs duty. Currently, the duty-free limit for parcels to Russia is 200 euros or 31 kg per parcel to one person (but if several parcels arrived to the same person on the same day, then customs considers all such parcels as a single whole, so you need to send parcels on different days with a short break). However, you can always send two different packages to two different recipients to avoid paying the fee. If the customs limit is not exceeded, you do not need to pay anything, and the parcel is sent to the courier service for delivery to the client. Otherwise, the customer will have to pay a customs fee: currently it is 15% of the excess value or 2 euros for each kilogram of excess weight. Usually, the payment operation is not a big problem: the forwarders are customs agents and you can pay the duty directly through them, so there should be no difficulties here. After paying the fee, the parcel is also sent to the courier service.
Mail carriers have another problem: a large amount of packaging remains from incoming parcels, so huge presses come to the rescue, which crush the boxes for further processing.
As the owner told me pochtoy.com He started shipping packages quite a long time ago — in 2007, he won a green card and moved to Pittsburgh from Minsk. On one of the forums, he was asked to send skates from the United States, and then he earned his first 30 dollars on this. In the future, the number of such orders increased, and over time this part-time job turned into a big business.
In conclusion, I want to note that from the outside, the work of such companies does not look like something complicated: I accepted the parcel, repacked it and sent it on, although in fact it is not so easy, and there are many nuances in this business. Choosing an intermediary for sending should be approached very responsibly, since when delivering your goods, there is an additional link that performs a rather important role. You should not pay attention to the theft of parcels, since warehouses are most often hung with cameras, and it is quite difficult to do this (but I would still recommend reading reviews before starting work), but I would take a closer look at the time of parcel processing and the quality of packaging, since some intermediaries can save on packaging and storage costs to reduce the cost. protective materials or handle parcels for a very long time.
