If you read our previous blog post, 3 Reasons Freight Forwarders are the Best Way to Ship Outside of the USA you already know Freight Forwarders are WONDERFUL, Amazing companies!

We are often asked if we can recommend a Freight Forwarder. Here’s what you need to know:

Every country has different forwarders. This means the forwarders to Italy are different from the forwarders to Brazil. The forwarders to Saudi Arabia are different from the forwarders to Australia, Belize or Sweden. With that in mind, we can’t recommend a forwarder, but what we can tell you is every forwarder we have ever worked with has been excellent, except for one… the worst forwarder is MyUS.com. We advise our buyers NOT to use MyUS.com because every time we have shipped to them there has been issues. Here’s a couple of the issues:

One time they signed for a parcel then claimed it never arrived. After many emails back and fourth, and OUR buyer being very upset, eventually MyUs did find it.

Another time MyUS wanted us to fill out paperwork for exporting real fur… but the fur wasn’t real. It was faux (fake) fur on the hood of $40 kids coats. Obviously a real fur coat isn’t going to retail for $40. The entire situation was stupid and a waste of our time as well as our buyers time. Then MyUS told our buyer that the order was 3 coats short…

After even more wasted time we discovered that 3 of the coats in the Lot had fake fur trim. So, it turned out that MyUS had opened the parcel, taken the 3 coats somewhere else, told us we needed to fill out Real Fur Export Paperwork, forgot they moved the coats somewhere else, then told our buyer we forgot to ship 3 coats.

It took so much time to get MyUS to realize the coats they are telling us are missing are the same coats they want us to fill out paperwork for. - SO FRUSTRATING!

The other reason we do not recommend MyUS is because they are slow to reply. You have to email through “support tickets”, which is fine, but it can take 48 hours or more to get a reply. So, if MyUS incorrectly says the shipper needs to fill out paperwork for fake fur, then it takes 4 days to resolve this issue… then MyUs says the order was short… it can easily be 2 WEEKS of downtime spent emailing them back and forth. And, during this 2-week timeframe, our buyer is upset and yells at us because they can’t get a quick reply from MyUS.

Besides MyUS, we have been working with Freight Forwarders for 16 YEARS and every other forwarder we have ever shipped to has been outstanding.

HOW TO FIND A FORWARDER:

Step 1: go to Google.com (or whatever web browser you prefer to use) and type “Freight Forwarders USA to ___your country name___”. So, if you need a freight forwarder to Egypt, you would type “Freight Forwarders USA to Egypt”, or, if you need a forwarder to The Netherlands you would type “Freight Forwarders USA to The Netherlands”

Step 2: My personal advice is to look over the search results and try to find forums where people are discussing which forwarders they like most.

Find a few different forwarders you are interested in.

Step 3: Open a second computer screen and type “___the forwarders name___ Reviews”. So if the forwarder is called ABC Freight, you would type “ABC Freight Reviews”. If the forwarder is called Air Cargo, you would type “Air Cargo Reviews”.

Reviews on Google as well as Facebook are pretty reliable because these reviews are linked to a real persons account. However, reviews left on TrustPilot are NOT reliable. Anybody can leave Trust Pilot reviews with no verification whatsoever. So, look for Facebook and Google reviews. Yelp is also a good source.

Keep in mind, it is normal for any company to have some bad reviews. The more customers the company has the more often they are going to have a person who isn’t happy. What’s important is to look at IF the company responded to the bad review and if the person leaving the review is a difficult / uncooperative buyer.

However, if there’s a ton of bad reviews and they all say the same thing, this means there is something wrong with the company.

For example, if every bad review says the forwarder “takes 7 weeks to forward” or “everything arrives broken” - this is a problem. And being that so many bad reviews were left stating the same exact thing, the forwarder clearly is aware of the situation and doesn’t care.

Step 4: Get a quote. There’s no way of knowing what your orders weight or size will be but you can get a quote for 18” x 18” x 16” and weight of 19 pounds, just to see how much something would be. 

Next:  Learn more about Freight Forwarders and how to find Freight Forwarders