Groupage: sharing a container from China to West Africa

A 40-foot container holds about 67 cubic metres. If your order fills six of them, you do not have a shipping problem; you have a sharing problem. Booking a full container for a small consignment wastes money; traditional LCL (less-than-container-load) freight solves the space issue but leaves you consolidating cargo with strangers you cannot see, under terms you did not set.

Groupage on Verifra is LCL with the trust problem solved.

How a pool works

A pool is a shared container on a published route with four visible facts: the route, the container type, the cutoff date, and how full it is.

1. Find your route: say, Guangzhou → Lagos, 40ft, cutoff at month end.
2. Join with your volume: reserve your cubic metres at the per-CBM share price. Your share becomes your own escrow-protected deal: your money locks with the licensed escrow partner, not with the pool organiser and not with the other members.
3. One evidence set for all: when the pool fills, a single supervised inspection and container stuffing covers every member's cargo. Everyone splits one inspection cost instead of paying for six.
4. Track to delivery: the container ships, arrives, clears and is delivered member by member, with each stage tracked.

What you pay

Three transparent components, itemised before you join:

• Freight, pro-rata: your cubic metres as a share of the container's.
• Your slice of inspection and stuffing: one supervised loading covers the whole pool; members split it.
• Verifra's consolidation margin: the coordination fee, shown as its own line, never buried in the freight rate.

Small consignments stop subsidising full-container shippers, and nobody discovers surprise charges at the destination port.

The protection that makes pooling safe

The classic groupage failure is the phantom member: the pool "fills", the organiser collects, and then one participant never pays, leaving everyone else stranded or forced to cover the gap.

On Verifra, a pool cannot be confirmed full until every member's funds are locked in partner-held escrow. If someone has not funded by cutoff, the pool pauses and follows a designed resolution: extend the deadline, refund the members who funded, or replace the unfunded slot. No member's money is ever exposed to another member's failure to pay.

Filling faster

Pools ship when they fill, so every pool has a share link. Send it to other importers on your route: a fuller pool means an earlier sail date for everyone in it. Serious trade communities fill containers surprisingly fast once the first two or three members are visibly committed and escrowed.

Is groupage right for your order?

Groupage fits consignments roughly between one and twenty cubic metres: below that, courier or air freight usually wins; above a half-container, get a dedicated box. If your volumes are regular, a pool on a fixed monthly cutoff effectively becomes your private shipping schedule, with inspection and escrow built in.