International Shipping FAQ’s

Mark: Hi it's Mark Bossert from Top Local, we're here with Mark Huggan of Phantom Couriers in Vancouver. Vancouver's best, downtown, all around courier, but I hear you guys are doing a lot of international shipping. What shipping size can I ship Mark?

Mark: Yeah, we've always done international shipping. So we got started off with documents, super simple documents. And then pacs, larger things, items. But we ship everything from, like I said, documents to hard drives, lots of film. Things in the film industry that get created one day and they get sent out to the, I guess they put them into a studio where they'll be looked at and recreated. I heard they talk, the guy gave them a name like that.

Mark: Rushes

Mark: Yeah rushes, stuff like that. Right down to lots of electronics. We've got a room full of television sets, there's seven television sets going to England. We're working on a container of beer to Korea and to China, samples of course. We've done everything. A guy has asked us to move cars. We've moved air freights. I moved a, basically it looked like a tank, it was this giant drilling thing and I put it on a train. It's not international up there, but it was a huge shipment, it went up to the oil patch. And then things all over the world. Like if I went back, it's crazy what we ship. I shipped a tortoise by air. All sorts of things. Like if you name it, we shipped it. It's bananas.

Mark: So what kind of expected delivery times do you have?

Mark: Everything from next day to six weeks. Like we shipped t-shirts for like a dating site and they don't want them to go fast so we basically just used international mail shipping. Otherwise we could have it in France in two days. Across the international date line, just plus or minus a day, you're gone.

Mark: And where do you ship?

Mark: Everywhere and I mean everywhere, except Antartica. Man like every country, everywhere. So people want things to go to Cuba, nobody wants to go to Cuba. We found a way to get to Cuba. We've been to Iraq when nobody wanted to go to Iraq. Any war zone, we've delivered there too. Africa. All over the place. Like it's hard and there's no guarantees, but we'll get her done.

Mark: So do you need insurance?

Mark: Yeah, if you want to protect your shipments, you always have to insure. You know if you don't buy insurance, you're not insured. It your duty.

Mark: Is that something you set up for people?

Mark: Yeah, but you know, when you're doing the deal, you're never asking, "And do you want to insure?" But if it's a valuable item, we get down to it, we'll insure it. The only thing you can't really insure is arts, heirlooms, anything that doesn't have a tangible invoice value. Anything you say, "Oh but it's priceless!" Oh please, don't ship that thing just do it yourself. But yeah, we offer insurance for up to anything. The standard insurance goes up to $3000 bucks and after that it become high value and high value just need a broker to take a good look at the invoice.

Mark: And what about duties and taxes? How do you navigate that?

Mark: So most duties and taxes are paid by the shipper. So we would assume that we're going to be the shipper, pay all the duties and taxes, value added taxes here and bill the client as they ship out. Anything being brought in, as you know as everybody ships with Amazon, they're like "I couldn't believe it, a $10 dollar pen and it was a $100 dollars in duties". That needs to be taken care of on the import. Exporting I would recommend paying them upfront so your receiver doesn't get stuck with the bill because a lot of times they refuse it. It just increases costs and traveling back and forth from the last mile things can go wrong. So it's best to pay now.

Mark: There you go if you want international shipping with expertise and super efficiency, the guys to see are Phantom Couriers in Vancouver. You can reach them at 604-899-5447. Call and check them out, they're awesome guys to deal with and Mark Huggan is the owner. Thanks Mark

Mark: Good, thanks for calling me up. See you again.