Shipping insurance for small business · Port of Oakland
A pallet of glazed bowls from Jingdezhen, a run of hoodies to two hundred customers, a reefer of dumplings coming off the ship in Oakland, a crate of frames for a bike shop in Berkeley. Northgate Hub covers each one for its full invoice value. The wording fits on a few pages, and when something goes wrong you speak to a claims handler in Oakland.
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One Northgate Hub policy sits on top of the carrier accounts you already have: USPS parcels, a weekly LTL pallet, a container clearing Oakland from Shenzhen, the regional courier you use for local drops. You keep your carriers and your negotiated rates.
Every time you tick the declared-value box, the carrier bills a percentage of what is inside. Drag the sliders to your own numbers and see that charge next to a Northgate Hub rate.
We use the carriers’ published declared-value tables. Your own figure depends on negotiated discounts, what you ship, how it is packed, and where it goes. A quote gives you the exact rate.
A carrier’s declared value tops out at what the carrier is willing to owe, which for most parcel accounts is $100 a box. We insure what the goods are worth on your invoice, whether that is forty hand-thrown planters or a container of denim clearing Oakland, from the moment the label goes on.
A box of dinner plates that arrives as shards. A carton of cycling jerseys that vanished somewhere between the sort center and the porch, or a pallet of olive oil lifted off a dock overnight. A frame dented under the foam. If goods are broken, wet, missing, or stolen on the way, the cover pays for them.
Call the 24/7 line or file online, add a couple of photos and the tracking number, and an adjuster in Oakland takes it from there. Nineteen out of twenty claims are paid within 30 days, and you can check where yours stands without calling anyone.
Online stores & carts
Add Northgate Hub protection as a line in your checkout. Shoppers pay a dollar or two to cover their order in full. Lost-parcel emails stop reaching your support inbox, and most stores have the integration live before the end of the day.
Our underwriters write up what the claims data shows: which packing materials survive a sort center, when a container from Asia is most likely to get wet, how porch theft varies by zip code, and why bikes and ceramics break in different ways. Each piece runs about two pages.
We pulled three years of breakage claims from small pottery studios and sorted them by how the box was packed. The cheapest method came out ahead, and bubble wrap finished last.
Most damage on the Asia–Oakland route happens in the first and last twenty miles of the trip. A plain guide to the handovers where cartons get dropped, the paperwork to keep, what your policy does while a container waits at anchor, and who to call when it clears customs wet.
Our harbors
Northgate Hub opened in Trondheim in 2010 and added Hamburg in 2012. The US head office moved to the Port of Oakland in 2017. Today 1,500 underwriters, surveyors, claims handlers, and adjusters work from 16 offices, most of them close enough to the docks to walk over when something goes wrong.
Send a work email and a line about what you ship: how many boxes a month, roughly what they are worth, where they go, and which carriers you use. An underwriter in Oakland replies within one business day with a per-shipment rate.
