LCL vs FCL from China: Which Is Cheaper for Amazon?

When you ship a private-label order from China by sea, you choose between two ways of using a container:

• LCL (less than container load): your cartons share a container with other shippers' goods. You pay for the space you use, measured in cubic metres (m³), plus the cost of packing and unpacking the shared container at each end.
• FCL (full container load): you book a whole container, usually a 20-foot or a 40-foot one, and pay for all of it whether you fill it or not.

The question most sellers ask is "at how many units does a full container become cheaper?" Units are the wrong measure. What decides it is the volume of the shipment: how many cubic metres your cartons take up. We've shipped LCL from China to Los Angeles ourselves, and the carton size mattered far more than the unit count.

Why volume decides, not units

An LCL price grows with every cubic metre you add. An FCL price is the same for the whole container, whether it is a quarter full or nearly full. For a small shipment LCL wins easily: you pay for six cubic metres instead of a whole box. As the shipment grows, the LCL bill keeps rising while the container price stays flat, and at some point the two cross.

That crossover is a volume. Five hundred phone cases and five hundred folding chairs are both "500 units", but one fits in a corner of a container and the other nearly fills it. The two worked examples below show the same order sizes for two products of very different size.

Example 1: a compact product at 500, 1,000 and 2,000 units

The first example is a $27.99 kitchen appliance that packs small. The figures are a Cap Engine calculation for one of our test products, labelled as an example.

At 500 units the order fills about a fifth of a 20-foot container. At 1,000 units it is still well under half, and the shared container costs $2.59 a unit against $6.84 a unit for a whole container nobody else is filling. LCL is the clear choice at both sizes.

At 2,000 units the shipment is 24 m³. That is too big to be priced as shared space in this example, so it goes in its own 20-foot container, 86% full. Notice that the freight per unit went up from $2.59 to $3.42. More units do not always mean cheaper freight: once you pay for a whole box, every empty cubic metre is yours too. Fill that container closer to 100% and the per-unit figure falls again.

One more lesson from this product. The shared-space rate first read for this route was far below what a whole container costs on the same route. A company that sells shared space has to buy the container first, so it cannot sell space for much less than the container costs. Cap Engine raised the LCL figure to the container market level. Be just as suspicious of a shared-space rate that looks too good, and ask for an all-in quote for your exact shipment.

Example 2: a bulky product at the same order sizes

The second example is a bulkier product at the same three order sizes. Again, these are Cap Engine figures labelled as an example.

Here 500 units already take up 21 m³, three quarters of a 20-foot container. For this product a full container is cheaper per unit from 472 units, so every order size in the table ships FCL. The per-unit freight falls as the containers fill up: $7.67 at 500 units, $5.07 at 1,000 and $4.35 at 2,000, when the two containers are almost completely full.

Compare the two products at 500 units: $3.27 a unit for the compact one and $7.67 for the bulky one. Bulky products pay to ship air. That is worth knowing before you choose a product, not after.

The 13 m³ case: almost half a container, still shared

It is tempting to think a full container wins as soon as you fill half of it. This Cap Engine example says otherwise: a larger order of a flat product whose cartons came to 13 m³.

At 47% of a 20-foot container, the shared option was still about $1,000 cheaper for the whole shipment. The crossover is usually well past the halfway mark, so get both quotes rather than assuming.

Other things that change the answer

Price per unit is the main test, but not the only one:

• Handling and risk. In a shared container your cartons are loaded and unloaded with other people's goods at warehouses at both ends. More handling means more chances of damaged cartons. A full container is sealed at the origin and opened at the destination.
• Time. LCL shipments wait to be consolidated and then split up again after arrival, which can add days. Ask your forwarder for door-to-door times for both options.
• Cash. A bigger order fills the container better, but it also ties up more cash and can sit long enough to pay Amazon's storage fees. Cheaper freight is not a saving if the stock does not sell.
• Import costs. Duty is the same either way. The customs broker and the other per-shipment charges are spread over more units in a bigger order. Our post on landed cost shows how.

How to decide for your own product

1. Get the carton size, units per carton and carton weight from your supplier.
2. Work out the total volume of your order in cubic metres.
3. Compare that with a 20-foot container: in our examples, about 28 m³ of usable space.
4. Ask your forwarder for an all-in quote for both LCL and a full container, door to door, including destination charges.
5. Compare the two per unit, then check whether you can afford, and sell, the order size that fills a container.

Duty doesn't change with the shipping method, and the free import duty checker gives you that part in a minute.

The short version

LCL is cheaper for small shipments and FCL for large ones, and "large" is measured in cubic metres, not units. In our examples, a compact product shipped 1,000 units LCL at $2.59 a unit, a 13 m³ shipment was still cheaper shared at almost half a container, and a bulky product needed its own container from 472 units. Work out your volume first, then get both quotes.