International courier from Bangalore to the Netherlands. Free home pickup.
Booked from your Bengaluru doorstep at whatever hour suits you, documented properly, and lifted out of Kempegowda on the DTDC International network — nothing travels overland to another Indian gateway before it flies. Express is 5–7 working days door to door, starting at ₹1,300 a kilogram before the fuel surcharge and GST.
Five steps from your Bengaluru door to a Dutch address.
Pickup, any hour.
Free at 5 kg+, at whatever hour you are actually home. The chip-design and product teams around Bellandur, Sarjapur Road and Whitefield keep late calls with European colleagues, so a ten o'clock collection is normal for this desk. Tape, bubble wrap and the airway bill travel with the rider.
Write the declaration.
A printed invoice with each item described in ordinary words, quantity, unit value and HS code where the shipment is commercial. KvK number for a Dutch business consignee, BSN or full name and mobile for a private one. Dutch customs works in English, so nothing needs translating — it just needs to be specific.
BLR gateway.
Into the DTDC International facility and out on an international departure from Kempegowda. An origin without its own customs gateway has to send the parcel by road or rail to Mumbai or Delhi and surrender a day or two before the flight even begins; from Bengaluru that step is removed entirely.
Douane at Schiphol.
Amsterdam handles an outsized share of everything that flies into Europe, and Dutch customs is built around that volume — process-driven, digitally integrated, and among the quickest in the union with clean paperwork. The trade-off is that Schiphol is also the most heavily screened freight hub in Europe, so a vague description gets a closer look, not a lighter one.
Doorstep delivery.
PostNL or DHL for the last mile. A Dutch address is essentially a postcode plus a house number, and the two together identify a door exactly — but the number suffix is part of it, so "12-A", "58 hs" or "104 2hoog" must be on the label as written. POD reaches you on WhatsApp the day it is delivered.
Starting rates. Billable weight sets the final price.
You are billed on scale weight or volumetric weight, whichever is larger, plus whatever international fuel surcharge is current when you book, and GST after that. Dutch BTW and any duty are calculated on arrival and collected from the recipient.
Starting per-kg rates
- Express (5–7 days, door)from ₹1,300 / kg
- Economy (7–12 days, door)from ₹950 / kg
- Min billable weight0.5 kg
- Pickup from BengaluruFree at 5 kg+
Volumetric formula: (L × W × H cm) ÷ 5000.
Worked example
A 2 kg parcel — say textbooks and sealed dry provisions for a TU Delft student, about 30 × 25 × 15 cm:
- Express, 2 kg × ₹1,300≈ ₹2,600
- + fuel surcharge (~25%)≈ ₹650
- + GST 18%≈ ₹585
- Approx total, express≈ ₹3,835
For illustration only — surcharge and rate card both change. Dutch BTW and duty are billed to the recipient.
What travels with the parcel.
Clearing at Schiphol means clearing into the whole European customs territory in one step — the same rulebook applies whether the parcel lands in Amsterdam, Milan or Frankfurt. Where the Netherlands stands out is throughput: high volumes, heavy automation, and an English-speaking customs service that is easy to deal with when something does need explaining.
KYC of the sender
Photo ID for whoever is named as sender on the airway bill — Aadhaar, passport or driving licence. Photographed at the doorstep, and kept nowhere except DTDC's booking record.
Invoice, specific rather than long
Item, quantity, unit value and an HS code on anything commercial. A Dutch company consignee supplies a KvK registration number; a private recipient a BSN or simply a full name with a mobile. Duty applies above a €150 goods value and import BTW applies to commercial goods at any value, so an accurate figure protects your recipient better than a small one does.
Prescription, for medicines
Sealed strips only, a copy of the prescription showing the prescribing doctor's registration number, and one line stating what it treats. Controlled substances are excluded under Dutch medicines law, and liquids and injectables do not travel by courier anywhere.
What the Netherlands doesn’t let in.
The food, plant and CITES lines below are the union-wide position that every member state applies. The drug-related lines are where the Netherlands is misread more than any other country in Europe — reputation and parcel policy are not the same thing.
Don’t even try
- Cannabis in any form, including seeds and CBD — tolerated retail sale inside the country has no bearing on what may be posted into it. At parcel level the position is zero tolerance, and Schiphol is the most drug-screened freight gateway in Europe.
- Pipes, grinders, scales and similar paraphernalia — blocked on the same basis, regardless of what the sender intended them for.
- Meat and dairy of every kind — the EU refuses personal consignments of both from outside the bloc. Ghee, milk sweets, khoa mithai and dried meat do not clear at Schiphol any more than they would anywhere else.
- Seeds, plants and fresh produce — the Netherlands is Europe's horticultural centre and its plant-health enforcement reflects that. No phytosanitary certificate means no entry, which rules out fresh curry leaves, coconut, saplings and seed packets.
- Counterfeit and brand-copy goods — seized and destroyed, with disposal costs charged to the consignee.
- Weapons and replicas — ornamental swords, kirpans and decorative daggers are all read as weapons under Dutch law.
- Ivory, coral and CITES-listed material — strictly enforced, including shell and coral worked into jewellery.
- Aerosols, perfumes and loose lithium cells above 100 Wh — an aviation restriction, and one that catches parcels from a hardware city more than most.
Allowed with care
- Filter coffee powder and dry podis — roasted, ground, factory-sealed, ingredients printed. Declared for what it is, it moves without comment.
- Silk sarees and stitched clothing — Kanjeevaram, Mysore silk, cottons, lehengas. Give the fibre and a fair value rather than writing "clothes".
- Sealed dry snacks — chakli, mixture, banana chips, commercially packed with a readable allergen panel.
- Sandalwood soap and powder — manufactured goods and perfectly shippable. The oil, being a liquid, is not.
- Electronics, dev boards and hardware samples — the characteristic B2B cargo on this route. Declare make, model, quantity and value, and flag anything that might be export-controlled before we pack.
- Books, transcripts and printed documents — declare the title and a value; nothing more is needed.
Chip country, student country, and a hundred-year-old diaspora.
For a country of seventeen million the Netherlands generates a lot of traffic out of Bengaluru, and it comes from three separate places: the semiconductor and product-engineering corridor, a very large student intake, and a Hindustani community whose connection to India predates all of it.
The Eindhoven hardware corridor
Brainport — ASML, NXP, Philips and the supplier base around them — pulls in Bengaluru chip-design and embedded engineers year after year, and the traffic runs both ways. Evaluation boards, prototype units, test fixtures and documentation between Bellandur, Whitefield and Electronic City and the Eindhoven and Nijmegen sites. Commercial invoice, HS codes, KvK number, and a word with us first if the item has any export-control character.
Tech households in Amsterdam and Utrecht
Indian engineers, product managers and researchers across Amsterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag and Rotterdam, many on the expat tax arrangement and many with parents in Jayanagar, Malleshwaram or Rajajinagar sending the things a Dutch supermarket does not stock. Coffee powder, dry podis, festival clothing, children's books.
Students at the Dutch technical universities
TU Delft, TU Eindhoven, Twente, Wageningen and Erasmus Rotterdam take substantial Indian cohorts, and Bengaluru sends a good share of them. Cartons in August and January — bedding, cookware, sealed dry provisions, warm layers. Student housing addresses need the house number suffix and a Dutch mobile, without exception.
The Hindustani community
Descendants of Indian indentured labourers taken to Suriname in the nineteenth century, who moved to the Netherlands in large numbers around Surinamese independence, form one of the country's older Indian-origin communities — concentrated in Den Haag, Rotterdam-Zuid and Amsterdam-Zuidoost. Parcels are mostly cultural: religious books, festival clothing for Holi and Divali, sealed dry sweets, devotional items.
D2C and startup stock into Europe
Because so much European e-commerce fulfilment sits behind Schiphol and the Dutch logistics belt, Bengaluru D2C brands often send their first European samples and pilot stock here. Trade-show units, retailer samples and small consignments to fulfilment partners. Give us the show or meeting date and we book against it.
Documents and diploma evaluation
Degree certificates, transcripts and apostilled papers for university admission and for Nuffic credential evaluation, employment contracts, and notarised paperwork for residence applications. Tracked express, with the deadline stated so we route it to the fastest available gateway.
Your AWB, live tracking, and proof it arrived.
You get the AWB on WhatsApp the moment the shipment enters DTDC International, at any hour, because the Bengaluru desk works nights. Track it at dtdc.in. There is normally one quiet stretch on this lane — the air leg — and a short one at Schiphol; Dutch clearance is fast enough that the customs gap is often barely visible. Once PostNL or DHL delivers, the POD comes to you inside the hour.
Three things worth knowing before you book.
My son's Amsterdam address is "Jan Evertsenstraat 58 hs". Do I need the "hs" part?
Yes, and leaving it off is the classic failure on Dutch deliveries. A Dutch address is functionally a postcode plus a house number, and that pair is precise enough that carriers route on it alone — but Dutch buildings are subdivided, so the number often carries a suffix that identifies which door it is. "hs" is huis, the ground-floor flat; "1hoog" or "II" indicate the floor above; and a hyphenated letter like 58-A is a separate address from 58. PostNL will attempt delivery at the number, find the wrong bell, and either leave the parcel with a neighbour or take it to a pickup point. Write the address exactly as your son writes it himself, including the four digits and two letters of the postcode, and add his Dutch mobile — with those, delivery is about as reliable as it gets in Europe.
I'm sending hardware samples to Eindhoven. Anything I should know before booking?
Three things. First, describe the item honestly and specifically — "evaluation board, 4-layer PCB with microcontroller" rather than "electronic sample" — because Schiphol screens freight harder than any other European hub and generic descriptions are what triggers a physical inspection there, not a lighter touch. Second, batteries decide how the parcel travels: a cell installed in a device is manageable, loose cells and anything above 100 watt-hours will not fly, and a power bank tucked in as an afterthought can ground the whole shipment. Third, semiconductor and precision-equipment items sometimes carry export-control implications, so tell us what the part is and who it is going to before pickup rather than at handover. With a clean invoice and the buyer's KvK number, Dutch customs handles this kind of B2B traffic all day and clearance is rarely the slow part.
Cannabis is legal there. Does that mean CBD oil is fine to post?
No, and this is the most consistently misunderstood thing about shipping to the Netherlands. What exists domestically is tolerated retail sale under specific conditions — it is not a customs policy, and it has no bearing whatever on what may be imported by post. At the parcel level the position is absolute: cannabis, cannabis seeds, CBD oil, hemp preparations and paraphernalia such as pipes, grinders and scales are all refused, and Schiphol runs the most intensive drug screening of any freight gateway in Europe precisely because of the country's transit role. A parcel found carrying any of it is seized, your recipient is contacted, and the consequences are considerably worse than a delivery delay. If you were planning to send a wellness product that mentions hemp or CBD anywhere on the label, leave it out of the box and ask us first.
Tell us the rough weight, the postcode and the house number.
Other countries from Bangalore
A collection from your Bengaluru door, round the clock.
WhatsApp the pickup address or call the desk. HSR Layout runs 24×7, and we will check the Dutch house number and the declaration with you before the box is closed.