Consolidated Cargo Shipping

What is consolidated cargo?

A consolidated shipment is any consignment smaller than a full load: LTL on the road, LCL at sea, a consolidated shipment in the air. The forwarder gathers several small consignments heading the same way, builds them into one full load and splits the cost of the trip between the shippers. A standard 13.6 m curtainsider takes 33 euro pallets in a single tier: in a dedicated vehicle your pallet pays for all 33, in groupage it pays for itself. What you give up is not speed but routing — the shipment runs to a consolidation schedule and passes through a warehouse, and on long lanes through two. There it is taken off, measured and built into another load, and it is those operations that the price is made of.

Why choose Black Port?

Groupage is not lost on kilometres, it is lost on small things: a sloppy measurement, a unit with no label, paperwork chasing the truck down the road. So dimensions, weight and whether the unit stacks are fixed at the start and checked again at receipt, while it can still be repacked. The customs side is handled by our own licensed brokers and the documents are ready before the vehicle is loaded: in groupage that is not a formality, because the border checks the whole vehicle, and one consignment with unfinished paperwork holds up everyone travelling beside it. The consolidation warehouse is chosen to suit the consignment — storage regimes and the permits a cargo needs are covered on the warehouse storage page.

What's included

• Pickup from your warehouse or a specified address
• Packing and marking of units to groupage requirements
• A consolidation warehouse matched to your consignment, and receipt of the units there
• Customs documentation on international routes — ready before the vehicle is loaded
• Shipment tracking and door-to-door delivery across Ukraine and to 60+ countries
• Cargo insurance options

How groupage is charged

A dedicated trip is sold whole; a groupage trip is sold in pieces, and the same space cannot be sold twice. So the charge runs on space rather than kilograms: it is based on the greater of two figures — actual weight, or volumetric weight derived from the dimensions. The conversion depends on the mode:

• Road groupage in Europe: volumetric weight is derived from volume, most often at 1 m³ ≈ 333 kg — a cubic metre “weighs” a third of a tonne whatever is inside it
• Sea LCL: the W/M system — the revenue unit is 1 tonne or 1 m³, whichever is greater
• Air: volumetric weight = length × width × height in centimetres ÷ 6000; here a centimetre of height costs exactly what a centimetre of length costs
• Oversized and non-stackable cargo: charged in loading metres (LDM) — the metres of deck length, across the trailer's full width, that your unit blocks. A 120 × 80 cm euro pallet that nothing can be stacked on blocks 0.4 LDM and pays for them whatever it weighs

Where the quote and the invoice part company

At the consolidation warehouse the unit is measured and weighed — the invoice follows the tape measure, not the booking. Two figures usually drift. The first is dimensions with the pallet, the wrap and anything overhanging included: the pallet alone adds about 15 cm of height, so boxes measured at 120 × 80 × 100 travel as 120 × 80 × 115. The second is whether another unit can go on top: without that, the consignment moves onto loading metres, and a no-stack instruction almost always ends up costing more than the weight does. If your cargo does carry weight on top, say so plainly. The coefficients for your particular route are stated in the quote.

What travels well in groupage

Groupage pays off for consignments from about one pallet up to a third of a trailer. The test is not the industry but how the cargo behaves at transhipment: whether it can be counted, lifted on forks and stacked under something else.

• Uniform units in rigid packaging that can be counted off the label without opening
• Boxes wrapped down to the pallet as one cube — they carry weight on top
• Equipment in factory crating with confirmed dimensions and weight
• Samples, exhibition stock and printed promotional material — where a dedicated vehicle never pays for itself

When groupage is the wrong choice

Loose or unpackaged goods with no pallet cannot be taken into a shared load at all: they cannot be measured unit by unit or moved on forks. Anything with a strong odour or a leak risk cannot stand next to food or textiles — in a shared trailer you do not choose your neighbour. ADR goods are not always accepted in groupage: it depends on the class and on compatibility with the units travelling beside them, so declare them at booking rather than at loading. Temperature works the same way — the trailer runs one regime for everyone in it. And one case that is pure arithmetic: once a consignment grows to roughly half a trailer, a dedicated vehicle often works out better, because it runs with no consolidation stops and no transhipment.

Packing and marking: what has to be ready before pickup

A groupage unit is handled several times along the route, so the packaging has to survive every loading operation, not just the first.

There is a second reason to pack more carefully than you would for a dedicated vehicle: on international road carriage the CMR Convention caps the carrier's basic liability at 8.33 SDR per kilogram of gross weight — it is measured by weight, not by value. For a light but expensive consignment that ceiling sits below what the unit itself is worth, and the first line of defence is the crate rather than the claim.

The minimum that has to be in place — and which of it we take on is set out in the quote:

• A pallet sized to the cargo — nothing overhanging the base, heavier goods at the bottom
• Several layers of stretch wrap binding cargo and pallet into one unit; corner boards and strapping where the load needs them
• Fragile and high-value goods in rigid crating, not cardboard alone
• Every unit numbered — 1 of 4, 2 of 4 — so nothing goes missing at transhipment
• A label on two adjacent sides: consignee, shipment number, gross weight, dimensions; old labels removed
• Handling marks — this way up, fragile — and ADR labels where they apply