Tracking on the COSCO portal

The COSCO portal takes a container or bill of lading number from the URL, so the widget above opens the result directly.

The result is per-container operational data: vessel and voyage, load and discharge ports, expected schedule and milestones. No customs status.

Here is the easiest mistake to make with COSCO cargo: **OOCL is COSCO-owned but keeps its own tracking portal.** Boxes with an OOLU or OOCU prefix, and OOCL bills, must be tracked on OOCL's portal — searching COSCO's will return nothing even though they share a parent. This is not a system fault but how the two brands are run, and it is the opposite of the CMA CGM group where every subsidiary brand shares one portal.

Separately, COSCO absorbed China Shipping, so the China Shipping prefixes now belong to COSCO and do resolve on the COSCO portal. That direction works as you would expect; OOCL is the exception.

The remaining causes of a blank result are the usual ones: your number is a house bill, the bill has not been issued, a typo, or the box has not been gated in.

Reading COSCO bill-of-lading & booking numbers

An ISO 6346 container number is four letters, six digits and a check digit. A COSCO bill number is shorter and usually carries a letter prefix. A booking number is issued when space is confirmed and is told apart by the document it sits on.

Reading the first four letters of the container number matters more with COSCO than with other lines, because they decide which portal you use. COSCO and legacy China Shipping prefixes lead to the COSCO portal. OOCL prefixes lead to OOCL's. Misreading those four letters costs a round trip.

One more thing: the box may not belong to a carrier at all. A great many are leased from container lessors, and a leased box can travel on any line. When that is the case the first four letters do **not** identify the carrier — only the bill of lading does.

Three fields on the face of the bill decide release: whether the consignee is named or the bill is to order, where the place of delivery sits relative to the discharge port, and the form of issuance.

Getting the electronic delivery order (e-D/O)

Step one: establish whether the shipment is COSCO or OOCL. In this group that is its own step, because the two brands issue their own documents and handle release separately. Contacting the wrong one is the delay pattern specific to COSCO cargo.

Step two: establish whether you are entitled to the release. Only the party named on the master bill deals with the carrier directly; if you hold a house bill, your counterpart is the issuing forwarder.

Step three: reconcile the arrival notice against the document set. The consignee name and tax code on the notice, the invoice and the declaration must match.

Step four: clear the release conditions — surrender the original bill or have the shipment in a form that does not require one, and settle destination charges. Take the document list from the Vietnam agent of the brand that actually issued the bill, or from the arrival notice itself.

Step five: the carrier issues the electronic delivery order and passes the data to the destination terminal system. COSCO has an ordering difference worth remembering: the release desk **confirms the funds have landed in the account before sending the release**. Having transferred is not the same as having been credited, so paying close to cut-off pushes you into the next working day by your own hand.

Step six: register the delivery on the terminal portal, pay, arrange the truck. If you are stopped here the blocker is in the carrier or customs data, not at the terminal.

Step seven, the one most often forgotten: **at COSCO the empty-return order is requested separately, not bundled with the delivery order.** You have to send a separate request and wait for the carrier to nominate the return depot. Several lines include this with the release, so anyone used to those simply skips it — then pulls the box out with nowhere confirmed to return it while the detention clock runs.

Where to find free time terms & how to request an extension

Free time is negotiated per customer and per trade, not a property of COSCO. A figure on a general page does not apply to your shipment.

Where to look, in falling order of reliability: the transport contract or rate agreement if you contract directly; the terms and remarks on the booking confirmation; and the tariff reference on the face of the bill.

COSCO publishes its demurrage and detention tariff **split by equipment group** — standard and high-cube dry, open-top and flat rack, reefer — each with its own rates and its own free period. So state the equipment type when you ask about free time for a shipment; ask in general terms and you will get the dry-box figure, which is well off if your cargo moves in a reefer.

In this group there is one more thing: COSCO terms and OOCL terms are separate sets despite the common owner. Do not reason from one to the other.

Keep the two clocks apart: one runs while the box is in the terminal, the other once you have pulled it out. Check before the vessel arrives. The party who can request an extension is the carrier's contractual counterpart, usually whoever pays the freight — if you bought on terms where the seller pays, the request goes through the seller or the forwarder.

What COSCO calls its surcharges

Surcharge names on a COSCO invoice often do not match the shorthand used in the Vietnamese market. Reconcile against the code printed on the invoice.

The terminal-linked group covers port handling at both ends and the documentation fee at both ends.

The market-linked group covers bunker, low-sulphur fuel, container imbalance, peak season, security, and war risk where the routing passes an exposed area. On Asia–Europe and transpacific trades, peak season and container imbalance are the two that move most.

Because COSCO and OOCL publish tariffs separately, quotations from the two brands in the same group are not directly comparable. Compare within one brand.

For each line, ask: is it inside the quoted rate or billed separately, at which end does it fall, and is it a carrier charge or a terminal charge collected on the carrier's behalf.