Its the whole world not just Malaysia and its been a long time since volumetric started. I understand the reasons for it but its been abused for the purpose of money. There are many times its not needed and they do it anyway, like a letter in an envelope. The basic way to combat this is to work to have no difference in weight or volumetric weight, like you said, which you do my adding more goods to fill the airspace and/or to reduce the size of the package, and to not have anything inside that doesnt belong, like heavy packing material.

My usual need is the 150g and 250g Flexipak which in the good old days I used daily and this will never come back due to the extreme charges now which my customers wont pay. I reopened my shop yesterday but expect no business. Because im out of business two years already, im really on the rocks now and will leave. But I cant leave because there is no shipping available for household goods and equipment. I cant even get quotations for anything. I went to a courier near me in Penang, Line Clear, because they advertise "international pallets" but they just laughed at me. Goods can come in but they cant go out?? WTH?

On your east malaysia shipment, as I know at the moment there is a 10kg limit with couriers so you have to move up to logistics companies and freight forwarders of which there are plenty around. Expect to pay dearly though. I think FedEx and DHL take at least 25kg on the airplanes but you might do better on boats where the volumetric allowance is much more favorable.

There are a variety of volumetric calculators online and you can choose what kind of carrier and get different results. The worst is an airplane but i think you already knew that.

Im getting email spam from China carriers advertising as low as RM2/kg but thats outgoing from China. The point here being that I wasnt getting them before now which means things may be opening up. As soon as travel resumes normally the prices will drop. "Open" countries means open shipping too and steadily the countries are dropping MCO, SOP, etc etc etc.

Its impossible for you to know the Japan shipper unless you specify with the seller what carrier you want, then the seller has to abide by those rules like weight limits. When you are outgoing from Malaysia, you can choose everything but its impossible for me to tell you who is good or not or what their internal restrictions are, you have to start calling around. Its highly doubtful there are fake couriers or forwarders but there are differences in prices and limits. Mostly the problems are that they marinate shipments until they fill containers so shipping may not be express. Look up freight forwarders on google and start calling. There is no one best wonderful company.

Im not against volumetric if its not abused. If you are shipping a tube that weighs 1kg but is 100 meters long, does it seem fair to anyone that you only pay RM7 to send somewhere and requires two lorries to move it? Or, you make a roll cage for a race car. It weighs 75kg but takes up a whole 20ft container. Is it fair that you pay RM500 for the weight but someone dedicates a whole shipping container they could otherwise sell for RM5000? Who is going to do that? Maybe the real question should be, why dont shipping companies figure out more efficient ways to ship weird weight-to-size ratio objects? Likely they wont try as long as there is someone willing to pay what they ask instead. You did.

Whats fair or unfair in volumetric depends on whats being shipped. I recently shipped a large table to KL and the quote was quite high. So I took it apart and shipped in multiple parcels and the final price was much lower because I was getting close to having no wasted space AND having each parcel not weigh much as well. I also was buying a step stool to take with me and the seller quoted a high price for shipping. I asked him to take it apart to make it extremely compact to save on shipping, even divide in two parcels and he refused, citing time and laziness. So the seller could have saved me money and he made the choice not to even though volumetric would have worked to my advantage. Volumetric CAN be used to reduce charges to the weight if you know how to pack FOR volumetric. In your case, can your furniture be taken apart to ship within the limits of the couriers and compactly? Thats how to beat the problem. How do people suppose IKEA ships across the world and still sells pretty cheap? Kits! Parts! Pieces!