The air freight shipping process
The export process starts with the shipper. - A shipper is the person or company that is physically and administratively responsible for shipping the goods; nothing more and nothing less.
Although in a lot of cases the shipper is also the customer of the forwarder. The customer can just as well be the consignee, or a third party that has ordered the goods stored at the shipper’s location to be shipped from A to B. For this same reason, the shipper also does not need to be the owner of the goods. This all depends on the delivery terms (or: Incoterms) that are agreed between the parties involved, e.g. a buyer, owner of the goods, a seller, a maintenance company, a distributor, a transport company, a forwarder, etc. (For more information on Incoterms look here on The Cargo Channel.)