Shipping and Freight and Warehouse, oh my!
What’s the difference between shipping, freight, and warehouse fees? I was recently asked by a potential client when reviewing our client agreement and thought, this is probably a super helpful topic to share with all of you! So here it goes…
who? what? when?
When working with a professional designer, that is a member of the trade industry, the purchasing process entails a bit more back-end work that we don’t always want to bore our clients with. After all thats why you hire us, to take care of the nitty-gritty stuff. When ordering product through trade vendors we sometimes don’t have a choice on how the product ships. For example, when you shop online at a furniture retail store you might see shipping options like: curbside, in-home, and white glove delivery. That’s not always the case when it comes to trade vendors. We are either offered some sort or in-home/white glove delivery or, nine times out of ten, they require us to ship to our preferred local receiving warehouse. In this case, the product ships through a freight carrier (not your typical USPS, UPS, FEDEX, etc) from the manufacturer to the receiving warehouse, and later installed in your home from the warehouse team.
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Often times we don’t know the shipping or freight charges until we are ready to purchase, which also requires a purchase order (again, back-end stuff). The warehouse fees are invoiced monthly for storage as well as after install for both product install and receiving charges. When putting together a project budget we used to estimate ~12% for shipping, freight, and warehouse fees, in recent years that cost estimate is now 20% of the product cost.
lets recap!
Shipping: white glove or in-home delivery, ships directly from the manufacturer to the residential address. Most commonly used for retail furniture stores, lighting, hardware, or accessories. Likely shipping through fedex, usps, ups.
Freight: ships from the manufacturer to our preferred receiving warehouse, typically on palettes. Mostly trade vendors or custom made furniture.
Receiving Warehouse: the short version: receives the freight shipments and installs them in our clients homes.
Warehouse : the long Version
Receives freight shipment
Unpacks paletted product, inspects product for damages that may occur, repacks and protect product for install
Handles small repairs in house or returns to vendor for larger damages
Stores product until it’s ready for install
Coordinates necessary parking permits, cranes, etc. needed for install
Does ALL the heavy lifting to assemble and install furniture
Trash/recycle removal