Airfreight can be an ideal way to ship certain products but understanding when to use it can be important. Like all shipping methods, there are certain situations where air freight may be more useful than others, and understanding when to use it can save you a lot of time and money.
Urgent Emergencies
Air freight shipping is at its most powerful when you are dealing with emergencies or urgent situations, scenarios where you need to get products to a certain destination as fast as possible. This can be important in cases where an order was not fulfilled properly, or you need to ship something immediately.
Reserving air freight for emergencies can really help cut down on delivery costs but also gives you an easy way to quickly restock a business or deliver products to a customer. In the event of product recalls and complaints, it can even help you ship replacement items to customers quickly.
Remember that the time reduction on air freight can be significant compared to any other option, beating even the fastest land delivery options. While it might not always be necessary, it is a good way to ensure that you can move items quickly.
Long Distances
Ocean freight is a great option on its own, but it can take a while if you are shipping items all across the world. Airfreight is a good alternative, allowing you to cut down on delivery times if you really need a product to arrive before a certain date.
For example, if you are launching a product on a certain day across multiple different countries, you could ship to the closer ones via the ocean and the further ones via air. This maximizes the chance of each warehouse or branch having the right products on hand when they are needed the most.
The longer a shipment needs to travel, the more convenient air freight can be, at least for occasional urgent situations. It can be expensive to rely on long-distance air freight for every single delivery, but it can also be a very convenient way to deal with unexpected delays or stock issues.
One-Off Shipments
If you need to make a sudden one-off shipment that will not be a repeated delivery, then air freight can be a useful tool, even if you are only going to be using it every so often. While ocean freight can be cheap when used on a regular basis, it is quite expensive to arrange an entirely new delivery route for only one standalone shipment.
Air freight counteracts this problem by allowing you to simply schedule your stock with another flight, make that single shipment, and then go back to your normal shipping schedule. Any group offering air cargo service can be a great supplementary option to your regular shipping measures.
This is especially true if you are moving a small number of items since ocean freight becomes more expensive on a per-item basis if you have fewer items to ship. With air freight, you are already operating at a smaller scale, meaning that it will not be as much of a loss to only send a crate or two of products.
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