Affordable Ways of Getting Pallets to Finland

Because it is situated in the extreme Northeast of Europe many miles from the British Isles, Finland is not the most accessible country from a logistical perspective to trade with. However, it is possible to send a raft of commercial goods to places like Rovaniemi, Oulu, Tampere and Turku – not just the capital city, Helsinki – economically from the UK. British export firms might sometimes go to the considerable expense of air freighting goods to this part of Scandinavia when sending a pallet to Finland by road would be much more cost-effective. In fact, with an express courier service using a van capable of holding a few pallets at a time, getting a pallet to Finland by road is sometimes just as quick as flying goods in. What is the least expensive option for Finnish trade?

Simply put, the best way of getting value for money when shipping a pallet to Finland is to use a freight forwarding firm that provides groupage rates. This will mean that your pallet will still be collected from anywhere you need it to be picked up from in the country. What happens next is that your pallet will be held temporarily so it can be grouped with others that are heading to similar destinations. The freight forwarding firm will handle the logistics of ensuring all the pallets end up in the right locations by dropping them off in a prepared order. Since the fuel costs and the labour needed to handle multiple shipments are shared among several British exporters, the overall cost will be much less than virtually any other shipping method you could name.

If you opt for a groupage shipment to Finland – as opposed to an express courier service, for example – then there are a few things to bear in mind. To begin with, UK exporters will still be expected to declare their goods with HMRC before they leave the country. You'll need an EORI registration for this and access to the customs online declaration portal. If you don't have prior experience with this, then get a customs clearance agent to help out. According to Barrington Freight, a company that deals with pallets to all parts of Scandinavia, not just Finland, many SMEs simply don't have the in-house skills to complete this sometimes technically demanding paperwork. Therefore, it is better to outsource this work to experts as your goods could be impounded either by EU or British customs officers.

Note that many groupage deliveries to Finland enter the EU in France or the Netherlands. They are then typically driven on through Germany and Denmark, crossing the Baltic Sea by road to make landfall in Sweden at Malmö. Most pallets to Finland are then driven to Stockholm where direct ferry services to Turku can be accessed. There are no direct ferry services between the UK and Finland, so this route makes a lot of sense. The other low-cost option that sometimes works out is to drive to Tallinn in Estonia and cross the Baltic via ferry to Helsinki.