Why is international shipping so expensive?Updated 8 months ago
Shipping internationally can get quite expensive and we did our best to find the most competitive rates that were available to us. We have spent hours reviewing different rates, and are also bummed to see how expensive they were.
We pride ourselves on transparency here at Pakt and wanted to give you a little more insight into the shipping world from our vantage point. International shipping has always been expensive but since shipping carriers use what is known as dimensional shipping rates (the amount of space a package occupies in relation to its actual weight) it adds up even more. For each shipment, you are charged based on the dimensional weight or actual weight of the package—whichever is greater.
So while a package like our 50L might weigh less than 5 lbs- a carrier like FedEx calculates the rates based on a dimensional weight of 13 lbs.
In addition to shipping costs, we are also charged additional fees from our shipping partner to process international orders.
So as you can see, we are certainly not making any money off shipping but as a small business, are just passing on shipping costs to the buyer.
We know these rates are far from ideal but we want to be able to give Pakt community members the opportunity to purchase our products wherever they may be in the world. So, our approach has been to find the best rates we can and then let people decide if they want to pay those rates to order a product.
We currently work with the following international retailers. I encourage you to check out their websites to see if your total order cost would be better.