Shipping Within Korea: Which Service, and What It Costs

You have something in Korea that needs to get to somebody else in Korea. Perhaps stock sitting in a warehouse, perhaps one box. In English there is a single word for this — delivery — and in Korean there are five, each with its own price, its own booking route, and its own idea of what counts as urgent.

Korea is one of the easiest countries in the world to move a box around. Next-day nationwide is ordinary rather than premium. The difficulty is not the logistics. It is that almost all of it is booked in Korean, by phone or through Korean-only forms, often against a Korean business registration number.

The five things people mean by delivery

택배 (taekbae) — standard parcel. The default for anything that fits in a box one person can carry. Nationwide, cheap, and the backbone of everything. The big carriers are CJ대한통운, 한진택배, 롯데택배 and 우체국택배, the last of which is the post office.

There are two ways to send one, and foreign senders usually only know the first.

You can take it to a convenience store at any hour — 편의점택배, covered in the convenience store guide.

Or you can have the carrier come to you. Fill in a 운송장 (unsongjang) — the waybill — pay, and a driver collects from your home or your office. No queue, no carrying. That is the part people do not realise is on offer, and it costs about the same. The 운송장 is a Korean form and the address has to be right on it, which is the only real obstacle.

The catch is speed. Taekbae is next-day, not today. If it has to be there this afternoon, you want the next one.

퀵서비스 (quick service) — same-day, point to point. A rider or a small van collects from you and drives straight to the recipient. Within a city this is hours rather than days. It costs several times what taekbae costs, and it is what people use when something has to be there this afternoon.

화물 · 운수 (freight) — too big or too heavy for taekbae. Pallets, furniture, machinery, anything a single courier is not going to lift. Priced by vehicle size and distance rather than by box.

행낭 (haengnang) — a standing scheduled run. Not a booking you make each time but an arrangement: a courier collects from the same place at agreed times on agreed days and runs a fixed route. It suits goods that move between the same two points on a rhythm — a warehouse to a shop, a branch to a head office — and it is priced as a contract rather than by the parcel. If you are sending on a predictable schedule rather than reacting to orders, ask about this before you set up a parcel account.

물류 · 풀필먼트 (logistics and fulfilment). Not a delivery at all but an arrangement: a warehouse holds your stock, picks and packs each order, and hands it to a carrier. If your goods are already in a Korean warehouse and your customers are in Korea, this — not a parcel service — is usually the shape of the answer.

What decides the price

Parcel pricing in Korea runs on two numbers and a few surcharges.

• Size, measured as the three sides added together in centimetres, not by volume. A long thin box can price like a large one.
• Weight, in bands rather than continuously.
• Distance matters much less than you would expect. The country is small and the network is dense, so Seoul to Busan is not priced very differently from Seoul to Seoul.
• 도서산간 — islands and remote mountain areas — carry a surcharge, and it is applied more often than foreign senders expect. Jeju is the obvious one.
• Speed. Standard taekbae is next-day-ish by default. Anything faster changes the service, not the tier.

Then there is 착불 (chakbul) versus 선불 (seonbul) — recipient pays on delivery, or sender pays at lodgement. Two things are worth knowing about it.

착불 costs more, typically ₩500–1,000 more than the same parcel sent 선불. Convenience stores and some carriers add a handling charge of ₩300–500 for taking money at the door, and the carrier prices in the risk of a refused or absent recipient sending the parcel back. If you are trying to keep the cost down, pay up front.

And tell the recipient either way. Sending 착불 to a customer who is not expecting it is a good way to have the parcel refused at the door — which is precisely the return the surcharge exists to cover.

If your stock is already in a Korean warehouse

This is the common version of the question, and the answer is usually not a courier account.

Ask the warehouse first. Many Korean warehouses either run fulfilment themselves or work with a company that does, in which case the shipping is already solved and what you are agreeing is a rate and a cut-off time. If they do not, a third-party fulfilment provider takes the stock, holds it, and ships each order as it comes.

The questions worth asking, in this order: what the daily cut-off time is for same-day dispatch, whether they handle returns, what happens to stock that does not move, and which carrier they hand to — because that decides what your customer sees in their tracking app.

Korea is easy and hard at the same time

The infrastructure is genuinely excellent. Same-day within a city, next-day between cities, tracking that updates properly, and prices that would look like a mistake in most of Europe.

The friction is all at the front door:

• Booking runs on Korean phone calls and Korean-language web forms.
• Business accounts usually want a 사업자등록번호 — a Korean business registration number — and a Korean bank account for settlement.
• Carrier customer service is Korean-only in practice, which matters most at exactly the moment something has gone wrong.
• Addresses have to be right in Korean. A romanised address that looks fine to you can be ambiguous to a driver.

None of that is difficult. It is just difficult in a language you do not read, from a time zone that is asleep when the depot is open.

Get it sorted

That gap is what we do. Tell us what you are sending, roughly how big it is, where it is going and when it needs to arrive — and we will tell you in English which of the five services above fits, what it should cost, and what the carrier will ask for.

Where it helps, we make the calls in Korean, read the quotes back to you, check the address is written the way a driver needs it, and stay on the thread if something goes missing.

To be clear about what we are and are not: we translate, interpret and handle the Korean side of the paperwork. We are not a freight broker and we do not resell carriage — the contract is between you and the carrier or the warehouse, and we will tell you plainly when a job needs a licensed forwarder rather than us.

KakaoTalk is the easiest way to reach us, and WhatsApp works too. We answer in English, and asking costs nothing.