Warehousing

If you buy from several suppliers, shipping each consignment separately is expensive. Our Shanghai warehouse receives goods in your name, holds them and, once there is enough volume, sends everything in one container — so the transport cost is shared. Yiwu is the second origin warehouse for the same pattern. In Baku the cargo can sit after clearance, be collected in parts, or go out to your own customers without a second handling at your door.

On arrival each consignment is counted, checked for damage and recorded in photographs. The report is sent to you. If a carton is short or a pallet has been crushed, you see it at origin, not when the container is opened in Baku. A special inspection — opening cartons, checking serial numbers, comparing against a packing list line by line — is agreed in advance and quoted as an extra, not done silently and billed later.

The first 14 days of storage are free. After that a monthly rate applies to the space occupied; the figure is in the quote, not in a surprise invoice at the end of the month. Long-term storage is the option when goods are waiting for a licence, a season, or a customer who is not ready. Labelling, branded packaging, palletising and stretch wrapping are the handling extras that turn a pile of cartons into a shipment a truck can actually load.

There is no limit on the number of suppliers. We give each of them the warehouse address and your order code; arriving consignments are credited to your account. You do not have to coordinate their drivers. You do have to tell us, before the first carton lands, how the goods should be grouped — by SKU, by shop, by container — otherwise we store them as they arrive and consolidate when you say the volume is enough.

Consolidation is the reason the warehouses exist on this corridor. A furniture buyer with four factories in Zhejiang, a retailer taking mixed cartons from Yiwu, a contractor collecting equipment from two vendors in Shenzhen: each of those is cheaper as one FCL or one LCL than as four air parcels. We will not hold cargo forever waiting for a last supplier who has not shipped; after the free period the storage clock runs, and we will tell you when it starts.

The Baku warehouse is the other half of the same idea. Cargo that has cleared customs can be split, held, or delivered in waves. That is useful when your own site cannot take a full container in one day, or when you are supplying several addresses in Azerbaijan from one inbound shipment. It is not a public self-storage unit; it is a logistics floor attached to the same team that moved the cargo.

Warehousing is the wrong product if you need a bonded facility for goods that have not cleared, or a cold store. We do not pretend otherwise. It is the right product for dry cargo that needs to be received, checked, held and shipped as one. Electronics, furniture, textiles, equipment and boxed consumer goods are the usual contents.

Send the supplier list, the expected volumes and whether the cargo should leave as soon as a container is full or on a date you name. Receiving, the photo report, the free fortnight and the consolidation into one shipment are included. Labelling, palletising and storage beyond 14 days are priced on top.

The free 14 days are calendar days from the receiving date of each consignment, not from the day you decide to ship. A carton that arrived on the first of the month and a carton that arrived on the twelfth have different clocks. We will not silently start billing; we will tell you when a lot is approaching the end of the free period so you can either ship or accept the monthly rate.

A usable warehouse instruction is the supplier list, the order codes they should mark on the cartons, how you want the goods grouped, and the rule for leaving — full container, named date, or a volume threshold you set. Without that rule we store and wait for your word. With it, a container can leave while you are not on the phone. Photos go out on receiving, not at the end of the month as a collage.

Shanghai and Yiwu are for gathering. Baku is for splitting after clearance. Using the origin warehouse as a long-term store for goods that should already be on the water is possible and expensive; the monthly rate exists so that choice is visible. Using Baku as a buffer because your site cannot take 40 ft in one afternoon is the ordinary use. Cold cargo and uncleared bonded cargo are not this product — we will say no rather than take them and fail the temperature or the customs status.