What Is Domestic Shipping?
In the United States, the majority of domestic shipping services are carried out by the United States Postal Service (USPS), United Parcel Service (UPS), FedEx Corporation (formerly Federal Express Corporation, a subsidiary of FDX Corporation) and its subsidiaries, along with participating companies in the merchant marine and a few additional small enterprises.
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Identification
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Domestic, as it relates to commerce, means "not foreign, not originating abroad," and thus domestic goods refer to those which are produced, distributed and sold within a country. The word "domestic" derives from the Latin "domus," meaning "house." In the shipping industry, domestic means, as UPS defines it, "in-country." Thus, in the United States domestic shipping encompasses all shipping between areas belonging to, or part of the United States. Foreign shipping covers everything else.
History
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Prior to the advent of the railway system in the United States, maritime transport persisted as the main means of shipping goods from one region to another. With the development of steam-powered vessels, inland waterways, (especially the Ohio and Mississippi rivers) were utilized as domestic shipping routes. Trains replaced numerous cargo boats; trucks and airplanes then replaced many of the trains. The postal service began offering rural free delivery in 1896 and parcel post in 1913, (seven years after UPS was established as American Messenger Company in 1907).
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Types
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Domestic shipping in the United States today is undertaken via a variety of means, from tractor-trailers and cargo planes to the ships of the merchant marine. According to the U.S. Maritime Administration, the merchant marine provides domestic shipping services to "41 states reaching 90 percent of the national population" and allows only "vessels built in the United States, owned and crewed by American citizens, and registered under the American flag" to operate in domestic commerce. Shipping companies utilize U.S. waters to move billions of tons of cargo via barges every year.
Features
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An example of domestic shipping in its simplest form may involve no more than printing a postage label directly from the USPS's web application, attaching the label to a box and sitting it out for the mail carrier to pick up. Foreign shipping, on the other hand, may require meeting a number of regulations for "what" can be shipped, filling out pertinent forms where required and expecting the package to go through customs of the destination nation where the contents may be opened and examined. Costs involved in foreign shipping are also considerably more than domestic shipping.
Considerations
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In an Internet world, email correspondence replaces items once transported via the USPS by the thousands. Businesses with stores on the web oftentimes provide drop shipments, (packages shipped directly from the manufacturer to the end user). This eliminates a substantial amount of domestic goods that once were shipped from a factory to a warehouse to a retail store before being purchased by a consumer. With new technology consistently being developed and applied, aspects of domestic shipping continue to change.
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References
- Photo Credit mailbox image by Pix by Marti from Fotolia.com
