Importing and Exporting for the Novice

| Wednesday, March 16, 2011
By Kat Clark


What are imports and exports and how do they benefit us? Well, imports are types of merchandise that are delivered to us from other countries that we use in the United States. A lot of these products are items that we do not mass produce in our country. We receive a lot of rice from China as they grow much more than we do here. An export is a product that we ship from the US to other countries. An example would be us shipping lemons to Russia as they do not grow as many as we grow here.

A lot of different steps happen for us to import and export. All of this trade needs to be negotiated and approved. These days most of our importing and exporting is done between companies. A big retailer may order 10,000 DVD players from Korea. Different players that are involved in worldwide trade include: Customs, Customs Brokers,Freight Forwarders,Warehouses, and many other services.

Remember, to move freight across the ocean we need some type of ocean transportation. We also need these vessels to be moved from the port to their unload destination. This is done with many different trucking services. Basically, an ocean container is filled with product. The full container is moved to an ocean port. At the port, the container will be loaded on a ship headed to its final destination. The ship reaches its final stop (Port of Los Angeles).

At the port, the container must have proper paperwork and pass customs inspection. It is unloaded from the ship. A trucking service that moves port containers will be move the container to the company's warehouse. The company will unload and verify the product at its warehouse. They will store the freight and then ship it to their stores.

This is a real short scenario of importing and exporting. It is much more complex than this. Each participant in the separate stages of moving freight are critical to the overall success of the freight movement.




About the Author:



0 comments:

Post a Comment