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Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

I suspect shipping is the real problem. Here in Japan, while there are several shippers who give great service at low prices within the country, there are almost none that do the same for international shipping.

I live in rural Japan in a famous tea growing area. Many of my neighbours are tea growers. They are desperate for ways to export their tea cheaply. I briefly looked into helping them out, but shipping looked impossible. They will sell me 100g of first cut shincha for $3-5 (in vacuum packed foil packages even!). But shipping? It will raise the price 5-10x. I bet the vast majority of his price is shipping :-(

The way to ship internationally is by slow boat. It's super cheap. What you want to do is ship by the palette (or better by the container) and then have someone on the other side forward it on with local shipping. But that takes both volume and cooperation of another entity.

For a small 1-2 person operation, it's infeasible.

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Exactly, especially now with yen being so expensive. For the past 6 months I've spent $29000 on candy and $26000 to ship it. If I used airmail with tracking it would cost 3 times as much.

How come I can order something fairly heavy from China for $3 with free shipping? Of course they do WAY more volume than Japan, but it still makes no sense, it costs me more than that to ship it across town, and it's literally the same guy doing the local delivery.

All of the world's postal services have peering agreements, the same as for Internet traffic.

IIRC the Chinese government will subsidize exports from china.

It really depends on the company you were dealing with. They almost certainly have someone stateside who are dealing with customs, picking up containers and unpacking them. With enough volume, it's quite doable.

Basically, for shipping by sea, weight is barely important. Volume is the most important thing. I forget how much it costs to ship a container (like those big containers you see at ship yards or on trains), but essentially it is little enough that cross atlantic/pacific is essentially free. If you have enough to fill up a container and you have someone who can do the paperwork on the other end, it is totally feasible.

I shipped my bicycles from England to Japan on a partial palette. I can't even remember how much I paid... Maybe $100. And that's for a third party shipping company that came to my door, wrapped my bike boxes, put them on a palette and found space in an unfilled container. The hitch? I had to go to the docks in Japan, fill in the paperwork, do the customs inspection, etc. It took me a whole day. To have someone else do the work for me on that side would have cost $1000.

If you can't receive large shipments, then they have you over a barrel and they will suck the money out of you. Probably there is a business opportunity there...

I forget how much it costs to ship a container

Order of magnitude: thing "new iPhone" not "new MacBook." If that leaves anyone flabbergasted, yep, that is why containerization is one of the most important technologies in the world.

And the current price may be even more surprisingly lower because we live through a period of shipping capacity glut, see the bankruptcy of Hanjin Shipping.

They abuse an old international mail agreement. When mail is sent between 2 countries, it might go through several countries and it becomes difficult to calculate costs and manage forwarders.

Since it was assumed that anyone who receives a letter would write back (mind you this was thought up way before online shopping in the 1860s) it would average out, so basically every nation in the world agreed to forward foreign mail for free, assuming it would average out. This only works for things that are send as mail and not as packages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union

> They will sell me 100g of first cut shincha for $3-5 (in vacuum packed foil packages even!).

To put this in perspective for those unfamiliar with green teas: 100g of a good shincha in the US would cost at least 3x that much. For example, Upton's, my favorite specialty tea retailer who has good prices, will sell you an excellent shincha (88th Night Shincha https://secure.uptontea.com/store/item.asp?itemID=TJ87 ) but 100g will cost $34 - excluding S&H (~$5).

BTW, If your neighbors are looking for a good way to sell tea, you should try pointing them over to Yunomi. I've met the guy who runs this site and he's very passionate about trying to help small Japanese growers:

http://yunomi.life/pages/about-yunomi

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