The FGX Shipping Process

If you’ve never shipped IT internationally before, you may be under the impression that it can’t be much more complicated than shipping domestically. But IT hardware as a commodity is unique: it’s high value, highly regulated by governments, and value dense. This makes IT shipments much more prone to customs clearance risk. There are also additional factors that need to be taken into account, especially for B2B shipments. For example, ensuring the way that a shipment is exported and imported aligns with your internal team’s accounting and finance protocols.

It’s why FGX’s global IT shipping process is holistic in nature and why we take a consultative approach for all of our client’s requests.

Shipment Request, Costs, and the FGX Feasibility Check

Before we provide you with costs and timelines, the first thing we look to do is to identify the best shipping options available to you. For example, if you have a business entity in Singapore, we can provide a shipping option that takes that into account, which would reduce the overall shipment cost by making the tax reclaimable and lowering import fees. The range of options that are available to you are a function of your shipment’s bill of materials, project goals, company's business footprint, internal protocols, and more.

So, we’ll start by sending you a form that contains a few questions. We ask the least amount of questions needed in order for us to run the datapoints through our algorithms to generate your optimized shipping options. (For FGX Enterprise customers, the FGX Platform is pre-configured with your company’s requirements so that you can get options right away.)

Even if you don’t know anything about international shipping or don’t know how to answer a specific question, our experts will be there to help answer any questions and “fill in the blanks.” For example, if you don’t know what HS codes or ECCN numbers are, who the Importer of Record should be, etc., our team will either obtain them on your behalf (wherever possible) or guide you to the right places to find the information.

Once we’ve received the submitted form, our team will review the details, generate the shipping options, and then provide you with their associated costs and timelines over email. For Enterprise customers, the options will be presented via the FGX Platform interface.

If your team wants to proceed with any of the options—although you’re never obligated to—we’ll run the shipment through our Feasibility Checks to ensure the devices that you’re looking to ship are actually eligible for export and import. We do this by running an analysis on each unique product being shipped to ensure that the devices satisfy all of the origin and destination market’s regulatory standards. For 110 countries, these checks are near instant, whereas for the remaining 64 countries we service, our experts will perform a more in-depth investigation.

Our Feasibility Checks are crucial because we don’t want to wait till the 11th hour to tell you that what you were looking to ship can’t actually be shipped.

If you’ve worked with traditional freight forwarders, distributors, or importer of record brokers, you’ve probably run into situations where they accept your shipment just to turn around and let you know it can’t be executed. Sometimes they’ll ship it and it gets stuck in customs! It’s extremely frustrating and worst of all, pushes out your project’s delivery date by an unknown amount of time.

Live Shipment

Shipment Booking

Once you’ve chosen a shipping option and want to move forward with a specific quote, we immediately get it booked into our system, issue a tracking number, and assign an FGX operations expert to the case. For standard shipping customers, the shipment will be managed over email correspondence, whereas Enterprise customers will be able to manage everything via the FGX Platform.

Extremely Detailed Manifest Process

For most of the shipments that FGX takes on, we will want the devices to come to one of our facilities first. There are certain categories of shipments that don’t have to come to an FGX facility prior to export, but we highly recommend that they do. The reason for this is because we have an extremely detailed manifest process. This process is what greatly increases the chances of a successful customs clearance.

We inspect every detail of each box and device being shipped, from its labeling, to device condition, to product markings. We do this for two reasons:

1. To ensure that what you’re actually looking to ship is what’s being shipped. There have been many times where a distributor accidentally shipped the wrong device and if we hadn’t thoroughly inspected the device prior to export, it would cause problems in customs clearance. Or, they may have dropped the device and damaged it, and inspecting the devices in detail will allow us to give you a heads up.

2. To ensure the devices meet all of the relevant product and packaging compliance requirements. And if they don’t, to make sure we apply the relevant remedy. For example, when shipping servers to Vietnam, customs is very strict about the import of used equipment. Although you may buy “new” hardware from a manufacturer, they may actually use a recycled chassis that has scratches on it. Even though the hardware is sold as new, when Vietnamese customs officials open the boxes and find scratches, the equipment can be sent back to origin, confiscated or even destroyed!

By performing an extremely detailed manifest, we’re able to get ahead of many of these problems to reduce the chances of issues coming up during customs clearance. Each country’s customs process has their own idiosyncrasies and we make it our job to know what they are and to get ahead of them.

Document, License, and Permit Obtainment

After we perform our manifest process, our team of experts will work on all of the documentation for your shipment. Each shipment has varying documentation requirements based on what’s being shipped, where it’s coming from, and where it’s going. But what remains constant is that we will complete all of the required administrative work prior to export.

For example, shipping encrypted equipment to Hong Kong requires that you obtain an HKTID permit. It usually takes a few days to submit the application and can take up to 2 weeks for the permit to be issued, assuming everything was submitted correctly. We won’t export until we’ve received this permit. But in the meantime, while the application is processing, our team will also have worked on all of the other documentation in parallel, which includes booking space on a direct flight to Hong Kong. So that as soon as the permit is issued, the shipment can be on the next available flight to its destination. If the permit takes longer than expected to be issued, we’ll simply push the booking onto the next available flight.

Although waiting for a license to be issued may seem like common sense, the key part here is understanding when a license or permit is required in the first place and how to efficiently obtain them. Many shippers and freight forwarders don’t understand what drives license and permit requirements and end up shipping without having done the required work.

We’ve had customers who’ve shipped Juniper routers to Hong Kong on their own without an HKTID permit which resulted in them being summoned to Hong Kong to sort it out.

With over a decade of IT logistics experience, we’re the preeminent leaders in understanding what drives all sorts of compliance requirements in countries all around the world. We’ll also tell you about this upfront when we issue our quote, so that you can properly set your timeline projections.

Transportation to the Destination Country

Once all of the documentation is completed and the shipment is ready for export, our team will securely pack the shipment while adhering to the destination country’s packing compliance. For example, in Brazil, you can’t ship anything on a wooden pallet (unless it displays the appropriate phytosanitary stamps).

After packing, the shipment will be trucked via dedicated vehicle to the airport of departure and be tendered on its assigned flight.

For 98% of our shipments, we’ll use direct air-freight as the international mode of transportation, which is the fastest and most secure way to ship IT globally. For lower risk and lower value shipments, there will be times where we feel comfortable using a courier like FedEx as the method of transportation to reduce your transport costs, and we’ll let you know whenever that’s the case.

Once the shipment is on its way, just sit back, relax, and wait for it to arrive at its destination airport.

Shipment Arrival and Customs Clearance

FGX’s approach to customs clearance is very simple: understand the requirements upfront, check all of the required boxes prior to export, and work with customs brokers that have decades of experience importing IT equipment. In some countries, we will have our own in-house customs brokers, in others, we have relationships with long standing and highly vetted partners.

Thanks to all the work we’ve done leading up to this point, a successful customs clearance is inevitable and mostly a function of time. Each country has varying customs clearance processing times but since we pre-fund duties and taxes, your shipments are usually first in line for processing. In the last decade, we haven’t had a single shipment get stuck in customs (due in large part to disqualifying many shipments upfront).

Now, no matter how much preparation you do, there are times when customs officers will randomly inspect your shipment. Given the high value nature of IT hardware, this isn’t an infrequent occurrence. FGX will handle all of the communication with customs and since we’re very experienced and did all the required work upfront, customs inquiries are solved very quickly. Throughout this entire process, we’ll give you updates and make sure you understand what’s going on every step of the way.

Customs Release and Last Mile Delivery

As soon as your shipment has cleared customs, we’ll arrange for direct transport to the destination site. Since we’re usually delivering to a data center, we’ll have worked with you beforehand to obtain delivery ticket numbers. Our team will also have reached out about any last-mile delivery details we should know ahead of time to ensure a seamless delivery, like freight elevator / pallet jack availability, waste removal / certificate of insurance requirements, and much more.

For Enterprise customers, you can store all of your commonly used delivery addresses and site requirements in our Sites feature for us to easily reference.

Lastly, after we’ve delivered the hardware to the recipient, we’ll provide you with the proof of delivery.

Post Delivery

For shipments where you acted as the Importer of Record, we’ll provide you with the associated shipping and customs clearance documentation as soon as its available to us. From time to time, a shipment may have random audits by regulatory bodies and in those circumstances, you’ll have our team’s support (subject to limitations).

From shipment request to delivery, FGX’s shipping process is focused on delivering great business outcomes and making the experience as seamless as possible. If you have a shipment that you need help with today or if you want to explore the “buy local, ship global” methodology, please reach out!