It is almost never the duty. It is the volume, and it is decided by the size of the box rather than by what is inside it.
Somebody sends us a link for a set of plastic storage baskets at sixty rufiyaa and is upset when the total comes back at two hundred and forty. The goods really are sixty. The rest is air, and here is exactly where it comes from.
Air freight charges on the chargeable weight, which is the greater of the actual weight and the volume divided by a fixed number the airline uses. In practice that means about one kilogram for every six litres of space. A set of baskets might weigh four hundred grams and occupy thirty litres, so it is charged as five kilograms. At ninety five rufiyaa a kilogram, that is four hundred and seventy five rufiyaa of freight on sixty rufiyaa of plastic.
This is why a laptop is cheap to fly and a cushion is not. Dense things are nearly free. Empty space is what you pay for.
There are four ways around it and we use all of them.
Repack. The retail carton, the void fill, the printed sleeve and the moulded tray are almost always a third of the volume and none of the value. We remove them and photograph the contents first. On a typical month's ordering this takes between a fifth and a half off the chargeable volume, and it is free.
Nest and flatten. Baskets stack, chairs stack, anything conical stacks. Tell us if a set can nest and we will pack it that way rather than as separate items.
Send it by sea. Bulky and light is exactly what sea freight is for. At four thousand two hundred rufiyaa a cubic metre, those baskets would cost about twenty five rufiyaa of freight instead of four hundred and seventy five. The cost is five weeks instead of eight days.
Or buy it here. This is the advice we give most often and it loses us the order. A great many bulky cheap things, plastic housewares, bottled anything, cushions, mattresses, tyres, are cheaper in a shop in Male once the freight is counted. We will tell you when that is true, because a customer who feels cheated on a set of baskets does not come back with the order that was actually worth doing.
The rule of thumb we give people: if the item is light and large, and you can buy something like it in Male, do. If it is small and dense, or it simply does not exist here, fly it. If it is large and you can wait, float it.
