Ocean Freight.
Lowest cost per pound, every major lane.

The first decision on any ocean shipment is whether it fills a container or shares one, and it is the decision that most often gets made on habit rather than arithmetic. A full container load is priced per box regardless of how full it is, so once your volume passes roughly fifteen cubic metres a twenty-foot container is usually cheaper per unit than paying by volume in a shared box, and the crossover for a forty-foot container sits higher again. Below that, less-than-container-load lets you pay only for the space you use, but you pay a premium per cubic metre for the flexibility and you accept the extra handling that comes with a shared container.

The premium is not only the freight rate. An LCL shipment is deconsolidated at destination, which means it is unpacked at a container freight station, sorted and held until you collect it, and every one of those touches is a fee and an opportunity for damage or delay. An FCL box is sealed at origin and not opened until it reaches you or your warehouse, so the cargo is handled far less and moves faster once it lands. For fragile, high-value or time-sensitive goods, the cleaner FCL journey is often worth paying for even when the volume alone would point to LCL.

There is a middle case that gets missed on both sides. If your volume is close to a full container, it is frequently cheaper to ship a full box slightly under-utilised than to pay LCL rates on the same goods, because you stop paying the per-cubic-metre premium and you buy back the faster, cleaner journey at the same time. We run that comparison on the actual dimensions and weight of your shipment rather than a rule of thumb, because the answer moves with the lane, the season and the current spread between FCL and LCL pricing.

Weight changes the picture as well as volume. Dense cargo can reach the legal road weight for the container long before it fills the cube, which caps how much you can load regardless of the space, and it can also trigger heavy-weight surcharges at the port and on the drayage leg. Planning the load to the binding constraint, whether that is cube or weight, is what keeps a container from arriving expensive and half-empty, and it is a question we settle before booking rather than discovering at the terminal scale.

The charges that turn a cheap ocean rate into an expensive shipment almost never appear on the original quote, because they are penalties for time rather than transport. Demurrage is charged by the terminal when your container sits inside the port past its free days waiting to be picked up. Detention is charged by the line when you keep its container outside the port, at your warehouse, past the free time for unpacking and returning it. Per-diem is the daily rate on the equipment itself. All three are avoidable, and all three are where importers who treat ocean freight as a rate lose the savings they thought they had.

Free time is short and it starts whether you are ready or not. A few free days at the terminal disappear quickly if customs is not cleared before the vessel berths, if the drayage carrier is booked after the container lands rather than before, or if your receiving dock cannot take the box on the day it is available. The single most effective thing an importer can do to avoid demurrage is to have the entry filed and the truck arranged before the ship arrives, so the container moves the moment it is released rather than joining the queue of boxes accruing charges.

Detention and per-diem are controlled at the other end, at your own dock. A container dropped for live unload has to be emptied while the driver waits, which is fine for a small load and expensive for a large one. A container dropped and left for you to unpack on your schedule starts a detention clock that runs until you return the empty. Knowing which model your receiving operation can actually support, and booking accordingly, is the difference between a smooth unpack and a surprise invoice three weeks later.

When charges do occur, they are negotiable more often than importers realise, particularly when the delay was caused by port congestion, a customs hold outside your control, or an equipment shortage on the line side. We track the free-time clock on every container, flag the boxes at risk before they tip into charges, and where a charge is genuinely not yours to bear we have the terminal and line records to contest it. The goal is always to prevent the charge, but when prevention fails the documentation is what recovers the money.

Which Canadian port your container should enter through is a routing decision with real money attached, and the cheapest ocean rate to the nearest port is frequently not the cheapest landed cost to your door. Vancouver is the largest gateway and serves most of the country, but it also carries the most congestion risk, and a delay at Vancouver ripples through the rail network that moves boxes east. Prince Rupert offers the shortest sailing from North Asia and a fast rail connection inland, which suits cargo bound for central Canada that can accept a less frequent service. Montreal is the natural gateway for eastern Canada and for anything arriving from Europe or routed through the Mediterranean.

The inland leg usually decides the answer. A container landing in Vancouver bound for Toronto travels several days by rail before it is even available for the final truck, and that rail time, its cost, and its reliability all belong in the comparison alongside the ocean rate. For a Toronto or Montreal importer, entering through an eastern port can remove thousands of kilometres of inland movement and several days of transit, which often outweighs a slightly higher ocean rate into that port.

Congestion and reliability matter as much as distance. A port or a rail corridor that is running smoothly this quarter can be backed up the next, and a routing that is optimal on paper becomes the slow one in practice when boxes are sitting at anchor or waiting for rail cars. We watch dwell times and rail fluidity across the gateways rather than defaulting to one, and we route to the port that will actually deliver your cargo fastest and cleanest for the conditions in the market at the time you ship.

Transloading is the lever that ties it together. Where volume justifies it, stripping the ocean containers at the port and reloading the goods into domestic trailers lets you run the inland leg on truck economics, return the marine boxes quickly to avoid per-diem, and consolidate multiple containers into fewer inland loads. For an importer moving steady volume it can take real cost out of the door-to-door price, and it is a service we build into the gateway decision rather than treating as an afterthought once the boxes have already landed.