Shipping with TNT: a guide to international and domestic shipments

An acronym for Thomas Nationwide Transport, for over 70 years TNT has been one of the world's leading companies offering international transport and logistics services, able to handle an incalculable number of shipments every day relying solely on its own internal resources.

So if you own an online store, it could be very useful to understand in detail how shipping with TNT works domestically and abroad.

In this article we'll look at how to ship with TNT in Italy and in over 200 countries and territories around the world, exploring all the services offered by the famous three-letter brand.

Here's the detailed table of contents you'll find in this post:

• What makes TNT one of the leading shipping companies?

• How to ship with TNT in Italy and abroad

  • TNT - Domestic shipments

  • TNT - International shipments

  • TNT Freight - International and domestic shipments

  • Time Critical - Domestic and international shipments

• TNT services dedicated to e-commerce

  • Proximity Network

  • Proximity integration

  • Pre Delivery Message

  • Returns management

  • Missed-delivery notice management

  • Additional e-commerce services

• Your partner for shipping with TNT

What makes TNT one of the leading shipping companies?

What makes TNT's shipping service particularly fast, precise, and far-reaching is the company's integrated air and road network.
The term "integrated network" refers to TNT's main characteristic: it doesn't entrust its shipments to third parties but coordinates every step of every door-to-door shipment internally.
This level of control is possible thanks to a well-developed technological infrastructure, a vast network of carriers, and a large amount of dedicated staff distributed across the country.
Reliability, flexibility, and the ability to precisely follow a parcel's journey from pickup to delivery (thanks to an efficient online tracking system) are the factors that have decreed TNT's success both for private use and for e-commerce and businesses that sell online.

How to ship with TNT in Italy and abroad

If you want to make TNT your main carrier, you can choose between several domestic and international shipping services, which will let you reach your customers in a nimble, affordable, and flexible way based on the delivery speed you want.

TNT - Domestic shipments

Among the various Italian carriers, TNT Italy stands out for its wide range of services with express delivery times within 24 hours to 90% of the country's municipalities, including small towns and islands. Here's the breakdown of all the services:

• Special Services: same-day delivery (where possible) of goods, documents, and freight with no weight limits across the whole peninsula, islands included.

• 10:00 Express: guaranteed delivery by the next working day (by 10:00 a.m.) of goods and documents up to 210 kg in 1,200 Italian locations (service not available in the Calabria, Sardinia, and Sicily regions).

• 12:00 Express: guaranteed delivery by the next working day (by 12:00 p.m.) of goods, documents, and freight up to 500 kg in 1,700 Italian locations (here too the Calabria, Sardinia, and Sicily regions are excluded).

• Express: delivery of goods, documents, and freight up to 1,000 kg by the working day after pickup, during office hours. The service is available across the whole country except Calabria, Sicily, and Sardinia.

• Economy Express: delivery of goods, documents, and freight up to 1,000 kg on a specific working day during office hours. The service is available for all shipments departing from or arriving in Calabria, Sardinia, and Sicily.

To manage shipments, you can create an account on myTNT, a site dedicated to contracted customers that lets you create, book, check, and manage shipping processes on a single platform.

However, the most practical and complete solution for an e-commerce is to integrate TNT with an e-commerce shipping software like Sendcloud, so you can benefit from 360° shipping automation that also includes full control over post-sale actions.

TNT - International shipments

To send an international TNT shipment you can use two types of service: express and economy.

International Express services

The different types of international express shipping let you choose delivery times in terms of days and hours.

• Special Services: allow the delivery of documents, goods, and freight with no weight limits anywhere in the world on the same day as pickup (where possible).

• 9:00 Express: a service to ship goods and documents with a maximum allowed weight of 210 kg, available for the main cities of more than 40 countries. Delivery is scheduled for the working day after pickup, by 9:00 a.m.

• 10:00 Express: a service similar to the previous one, with the difference that it can deliver to the main cities of more than 45 countries worldwide by 10:00 a.m. the next working day.

• 12:00 Express: allows the delivery of goods, documents, and freight with a maximum weight of 500 kg to the main urban centers of over 65 nations. Delivery is guaranteed by 12:00 p.m. the next working day.

• Express: a service available globally to ship goods, documents, and freight with a maximum weight of 500 kg. Delivery is guaranteed the next day during office hours.

International Economy services

For low-cost international shipments of heavy goods not characterized by delivery urgency.

• 12:00 Economy Express: delivery of goods and freight with a maximum weight of 500 kg by 12:00 p.m. on a selected working day. The service is available to ship to the major cities of over 25 European countries.

• Economy Express: delivery of goods and freight with a maximum weight of 7,000 kg worldwide on a specific working day during office hours.

4 tips to prepare a TNT international shipment

Before shipping your products around the world with TNT, take the following steps.

1. Check customs regulations: make sure the goods leaving the warehouse have all the necessary documentation attached - including a complete commercial invoice - so as to avoid delays and additional costs.

2. Calculate rates and customs duties: duties vary from one destination to another and based on the value of the goods, so find out how much they amount to and whether the costs fall on the sender or the recipient.

3. Find out what you can ship and where: if the goods don't comply with the territory's laws, they can be confiscated or destroyed. Always make sure your products don't violate international sanctions.

4. Take care with packaging: to avoid the risk of damage during transport or delays, make sure the packaging and labeling comply with the rules of each foreign country.

TNT Freight - International and domestic shipments

TNT's Freight service lets you ship heavy loads (over 100 kg), bulky or irregularly shaped, both in Italy and abroad.

Time Critical - Domestic and international shipments

The flexibility of TNT's services is also reflected in the ability to arrange tailor-made solutions for every type of need.

Here are the special on-demand services that let you, on one hand, benefit from the convenience of the express network (where possible) and, on the other, cut transport costs using an excellent service that ensures maximum priority and punctuality:

In addition, you can also choose special transport by chartering aircraft (Air charter) or the TNT On Board Courier, which lets you transport small-sized loads on scheduled flights.

TNT services dedicated to e-commerce

If you run an online commerce business and need flexibility and customization, this carrier offers a range of very interesting solutions such as, for example:

• choosing the day and cut-off time for delivery;

• giving customers the ability to interact with the courier, without having to wait for their arrival;

• following the parcel throughout its whole journey to destination, thanks to the tracking code that lets you keep every stage of the shipment under control;

• benefiting from an advanced tracking system accessible to both sender and recipient, so shipments can be managed and followed nimbly and independently;

• having a simple and functional return process.

Here in detail are the specific services for e-commerce.

Proximity Network

The service that lets you offer your customers delivery of parcels at more than 1,250 TNT branches, lockers, and FedEx Locations across Italy, eliminating customer waiting times and reducing shipping costs for you.

Proximity integration

A free plugin that produces banners informing your customers of the ability to choose the most convenient place to collect their purchases directly from your site's checkout page.

Pre Delivery Message

A mobile messaging service that lets customers change the date and place they receive their deliveries up to a few hours before arrival at the pickup point.

Returns management

Simplifies the return process for both customer and seller by creating a unique virtual code for the return shipment.

Missed-delivery notice management

Lets the customer arrange a new delivery (even to a different address) via the TT Italia app if they're absent when the TNT courier arrives.

Additional e-commerce services

TNT also offers other supplementary services to round out its offering for e-commerce operators and to keep improving consumers' online shopping experience.

These include:

• the option to pay by cash on delivery;

• scheduled redelivery;

• delivery by appointment;

• an SMS Alert for the recipient awaiting delivery;

• the creation of a proof of delivery (or POD, Proof Of Delivery)

Now that you know all the main TNT shipping options, we invite you to reflect on what is perhaps the most interesting option for managing your online shop's international and domestic shipments.

Have you ever thought about adopting a multi-carrier strategy? Sendcloud, for example, lets you integrate more than 80 domestic and international carriers into a single shipping platform, so you can broaden the delivery offering for your customers while reducing shipping costs at the same time.

Your partner for shipping with TNT

We hope our guide to TNT's services has been useful!

That said, if you don't want to take precious time away from running your business, we can do much more than give you useful information.

The Sendcloud shipping platform already helps more than 23,000 successful e-commerce businesses send products to every corner of the world, and every day new customers contact us to ask us to simplify and unify their shipping processes.

Request a no-obligation demo to discover Sendcloud's services.

As one last thing before we leave you, we recommend making a comparison of Italian and international carriers by taking a look at our articles on the subject:

• Shipping with Poste Italiane

• Shipping with FedEx

• Shipping with DHL

• DHL Globalmail

• Shipping with BRT

• Shipping with GLS

It's always useful to compare before making a decision!