Shipped my cabs by bus: cheap, BUT......

Gimongous · #1 04-18-2011, 08:11 PM

So I found a great deal on CL that I bought - one EA VL110 cab and a VL110 iamp500 combo. The seller is in CA and I live in VA, so I knew that shipping would be costly but the deal was too good to pass up

. The EA cabs are small but heavy for their size. The best quotes I could get through USPS and UPS were in the range of $250-$300. FedEx was something crazy like $500.

I tried a site called Freight Center online that allows you to post your shipping job and have shippers send you bids for the transport. I figured two small boxes, just throw them on the back of some truck already going cross country for a hundred bucks of easy money, but no such luck. My best offer was $395.

Then I found a site Busfreighter.com. This site buys space from Greyhound package shipping and resells it at a discount, cheaper than what you would pay shipping directly through Greyhound. This deal looked pretty good - $130 for both boxes, insured to $1000 for no extra cost. This price is for station to station transport, you drop off and pick up at the respective stations. There was a pick list online of station options for origination and delivery locations that were convenient including a station in my town 4miles from my house. Next step - pay for the service, they email shipping labels to me and I forward to the seller who will pack gear, print labels and drop the goods to be shipped. Easy, right?

Man, this process turned out to be nothing but trouble. I needed to call the originating station to verify their hours for drop off for the seller. After two days of calling with no aswer, I eventually called the Greyhound station in the next city who was able to give me the hours (actual station hours differ frequently differ from those posted online, I discovered). When the shipping label e-mail came, it was minus the attachment of the actual shipping labels. This took a few calls to Tx to straighten out. When they came, I noticed the destination station on the shipping labels was different from the one I had selected. More calls to Tx (to Busfreighter.com). Turns out that the station in my city does not accept package deliveries. No big deal I guess, I can drive 30mins to downtown Hampton to pick up my cabs

. I get a message a week later from the Hampton station that the delivery has arrived. I try for 3 days to reach the station to confirm package pick up times but nobody is working there apparently. I end up going down and by pure luck happen to find someone in the office, since the pickup times there are different from what is posted online. However, only one of my cabs is there. I am assured that the other one should be coming on the next bus.... I pick up my one delivery and then call intermittently for 3 more days hoping that the second box will show. I try to use the tracking # I have from Busfreighter online but it can only tell me that the packages were dropped off in CA and are en route. I ask the guy in Hampton if there's any way he can track the package for me and now I need a different number that is not on any of my paperwork. This time an email to Busfreighter gets me the number I need and tonight the Hampton package guy is in and he looks up the delivery to find that it has been delivered to Richmond, 45 miles away and that is its final destination

. At this point I am just happy to know that my stuff hasn't been lost , or stolen, or vanished that I am only slightly grumpy about having to drive to Richmond to get it.

Wonder what their hours are for pick up?

jondog · #2 04-19-2011, 04:19 AM

I used Greyhound once for a large cab and it worked fine and was cheap. I think the difference was that I put it on the bus myself and told the receiver what bus it was on and he went and met that specific bus on his end.

jive1 · #3 04-19-2011, 01:03 PM

Based on the quotes in the OP, it looks like the person was getting list pricing. For FedEx or UPS, if you sign up for an account, you usually will get a discount.

I can't imagine 40-50lb package costing any more than $70 to ship coast to coast unless you tried to do some expedited shipping, or you lived somewhere remote and had lots of fuel surcharges. Did you try to get the cab and combo shipped together in the same box? Sometimes when you go over a certain weight limit, you get bundled in the the freight category which can cost more and take more time to deliver.

bongomania · #4 04-19-2011, 02:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jive1

I can't imagine 40-50lb package costing any more than $70 to ship coast to coast unless you tried to do some expedited shipping, or you lived somewhere remote and had lots of fuel surcharges. Did you try to get the cab and combo shipped together in the same box? Sometimes when you go over a certain weight limit, you get bundled in the the freight category which can cost more and take more time to deliver.

+1
From a city on one coast to a city on the other coast, I would expect to pay less than $80 to ship one cab, using UPS. So $160 for two. As Jive says there can be other fees like for remote locations, insurance, faster delivery, having a pack'n'ship place do the packing, etc... but basic ground service where I do the boxing-up is not $250-$500 expensive, even for a heavy-but-not-huge cab. Believe it or not, you get a better rate for a small very heavy package than you do for a large very light package, because of what they call "balloon rates".

All that said, I have shipped by Greyhound many times and it worked out great, when I was personally able to take the package directly to the GH station and the recipient was able to pickup up directly from their local GH station. I can easily imagine how it would turn into a nightmare with an unknown middle-man handling things at either end of the trip.

Gimongous · #5 04-21-2011, 03:25 PM

Hmm, didn't know about signing up for an account for UPS, FedEx. In my daily life I don't have much need for shipping heavy stuff. The original quotes I got were standard rates from my local UPS store, no expedited shipping or other "extras". Are the rates for account holders really so much cheaper? I did not look into rates for the cab and the combo together, since the combined weight was about 130#.

I can see that the Greyhound route would be attractive if you could set it up to do a direct drop off and retrieval from the bus carrying the equipment. Based on my experience I would not recommend the Busfreighter option since it does not allow you to specify a specific bus, the freight goes out on a space available basis and gets to the destination "when it gets there".