Shipping has multiple meanings. It can be a physical process of transporting commodities and merchandise goods and cargo, by land, air, and sea. It also can describe the movement of objects by ship.

Land or "ground" shipping can be by train or by truck. In air and sea shipments, ground transportation is required to take the cargo from its place of origin to the airport or seaport and then to its destination because it is not always possible to establish a production facility near ports due to limited coastlines of countries. Ground transportation is typically more affordable than air shipments, but more expensive than shipping by sea especially in developing countries like India, where Inland infrastructure is not efficient.

Shipment of cargo by trucks, directly from the shipper's place to the destination, is known as a door to door shipment and more commonly multimodal transport system. Trucks and trains make deliveries to sea ports and air ports where cargo is moved in bulk.

Much shipping is done aboard actual ships. An individual nation's fleet and the people that crew it are referred to as its merchant navy or merchant marine. Merchant shipping is lifeblood to the world economy, carrying 90% of international trade with 102,194 commercial ships worldwide. The term shipping in this context originated from the shipping trade of wind power ships, and has come to refer to the delivery of cargo and parcels of any size above the common mail of letters and postcards.

Logistics is the management of the flow of resources, not only goods, between the point of origin and the point of destination in order to meet the requirements of customers or corporations. Logistics involves the integration of information, transportation, inventory, warehousing, material handling, and packaging, and often security. Today the complexity of production logistics can be modeled, analyzed, visualized and optimized by plant simulation software, but is constantly changing. This can involve anything from consumer goods such as food, to IT materials, to aerospace and defense equipment.

The term logistics comes from the Greek logos (λόγος), meaning "speech, reason, ratio, rationality, language, phrase", and more specifically from the Greek word logistiki (λογιστική), meaning accounting and financial organization^{[citation needed]}.

Logistics is considered to have originated in the military's need to supply themselves with arms, ammunition and rations as they moved from their base to a forward position. In ancient Greek, Roman and Byzantine empires, military officers with the title Logistikas were responsible for financial and supply distribution matters^{[citation needed]}.