Same cartons. Same weight.
11.1× the freight bill.

One shipment, every channel

This is the workbench's own sample shipment, priced on every channel it ships with. The numbers below were computed at build time by the same engine the workbench uses — they are not typed in by hand.

The cheapest line is not automatically the cheapest shipment. The lowest total on this table — Ocean LCL — is priced Port-to-port · excludes destination CFS, customs, delivery and duty. It stops before the destination, while the DDP options on the same table include duty, delivery and destination charges. Comparing them straight across is the most common way to get this decision wrong by a factor of two.

Where the market is: Freightos Baltic Index FBX01 (China/East Asia → US West Coast) — $8,348 USD/FEU on 2026-09-19 (+$633 week over week, +$2,254 since early August). It enters no calculation here; it's there so you can see how far your own quotes sit from it.

Not every channel can carry this shipment. Full container 20GP doesn't fit — 775 cartons is 33.1 CBM / 1,426.32 kg against its 28 CBM / 17,000 kg limit. That's a capacity limit, not a price. Full containers are the option sellers most often assume is cheapest and least often check.

Where the money actually is

Ordered by how much it moves, measured on the shipment above. The ranking is not stable — it shifts with freight rates, which is why the workbench recomputes it every time instead of quoting a rule of thumb.

1. Picking the channel 11.1×

   Ocean LCL comes in at $4,429.60 (Port-to-port · excludes destination CFS, customs, delivery and duty). International express (DHL / UPS / FedEx) comes in at $49,036.10. Same cartons, same packing, same day. Nothing you do inside the box competes with this.

2. Not crossing a size tier 450 / 775 cartons

   That many cartons in this shipment sit within 0.5 in of an FBA tier boundary. Carton tolerance or a thick tape line can push them over — and the FBA fee step is not proportional to the extra inch. The workbench flags each one and tells you how much smaller the box needs to be.

3. Consolidating batches 6.7%

   Shipping every batch the moment it's ready costs $1,724.50. The cheapest schedule that never runs out of stock costs $1,608.50 — 6.7% less. Most of that saving is per-shipment fees: customs, documents, B/L. The constraint is real, though: holding stock costs money, and the workbench prices that too.

The ordering above is a finding, not a promise. When ocean rates spike, the per-carton channel saving grows and consolidation shrinks — because consolidation saves a fixed dollar amount per shipment while the freight bill in the denominator gets bigger. The tool recomputes; we don't quote a rule of thumb.

We compare. We don't quote.

Three things we will not do, because each one would make the comparison worth less than nothing.

What it doesn't do yet

Stated up front, because a tool that hides its limits gets used past them.

• No mixed-SKU cartons. Cartons are packed one SKU per carton. Mixing can use a little more of each box, but it makes the packing list hard to verify on the receiving end — we'd rather this line be solid first.
• No soft-pack compression. Bags, foam and fabric are treated as their stated size. Their real benefit is that they compress, and squeezing them into the packing model would break the dimension accuracy everything else depends on.
• No multi-carton-type strategy. You pick the cartons you'd actually buy, and the workbench finds the best arrangement among them. It won't invent a carton size you can't order.
• No duty or tariff modelling. Customs duty, tariffs and de minimis rules change too often to belong in a yes/no comparison, and they don't affect how you should pack a box. We leave them out and say so, rather than burying a stale rate in a total.

Try it on a shipment you're actually planning

It runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and you can replace every rate with your own before the first number matters.