Carriage and forwarding are different contracts
They are often confused, and the difference decides who answers for what.
A contract of carriage — the carrier undertakes to move the goods from A to B and hand them to the consignee. It answers for the goods in transit.
A freight forwarding contract — the forwarder undertakes to organise the carriage: find the transport, prepare the papers, clear customs, arrange insurance, follow the cargo.
In practice a shipper is better served by the second: one contract for the whole route instead of separate dealings with a haulier, a warehouse and a broker.
Liability is not what it looks like
The main surprise in international road carriage is the liability cap. Under the CMR Convention the carrier answers not for the value of the goods but for their weight: 8.33 SDR per kilogram of cargo lost.
For a pallet of building materials that may cover the loss entirely. For a pallet of electronics it bears no relation to the price. Expensive, light cargo without an insurance policy is therefore a risk — whatever the contract says about the carrier's “full responsibility”.
What an international carriage contract must contain
- Route and points. Not “China to Uzbekistan” but the actual loading and unloading addresses.
- Description of the goods. Name, weight, volume, nature. Dangerous, temperature-controlled or oversized cargo changes the terms and must be named.
- Delivery time. And what counts as a breach: a hold at the border caused by customs and a delay caused by the carrier are different things.
- The rate and what it covers. Loading, unloading, demurrage, transhipment at the border, storage — either listed or destined to become a dispute.
- How the rate may change. Whether it can rise in transit and on what grounds.
- Documents. Who prepares the transport and commercial papers, and who answers for errors in them.
- Claims. The deadline, the form, the addressee. This is where people most often discover the deadline has passed.
Why a template found online is a poor idea
“Contract of carriage template” is among the most common searches, and the reason is plain — a ready-made document is tempting. The trouble is that a ready-made document was written for somebody's situation, usually the carrier's, and it is precisely the shipper-protecting clauses that are missing.
Second, international carriage is not domestic carriage. A template found by a general search will almost certainly be domestic: no convention, no customs clearance, no allocation of liability across the legs of the route.
How we do it
We work under a freight forwarding contract: one contract for the whole route, including customs clearance of the cargo we carry ourselves.