Transport, customs, and everything that happens in between

We arrange this for every order we sell, so the pages below are not theory. They are the questions our desk answers week after week, written down once. If you would rather skip to your own route, tell us the lane and we will say what we know about it today.

What sits inside a landed price

Five lines make up the cost of getting goods from a factory to your door. People compare quotes without knowing which of the five a quote contains, which is why two prices for the same goods can look nothing alike.

1. The goods. What the factory charges, at the factory.
2. Our fee. What we charge to find, check, buy and move it.
3. The freight. The journey itself, plus handling at both ends.
4. The customs entry. The declaration, filed by a broker in the destination country.
5. The duty and the import tax. Set by the tariff code and the declared value, and decided by customs, not by us.

We sell the first four as a single delivered number. The fifth we can only ever suggest, because the authority at the border makes the final call on the code, the rate and the value. Anyone who guarantees you a duty figure is telling you something they cannot know.

Incoterms: three letters that decide who pays

An Incoterm says where the seller stops paying and you start, and where the risk of loss moves from them to you. There are eleven of them. Importing from Asia you will be offered three.

• FOB, Free On Board. The seller gets the goods on board the vessel and clears export. Risk passes on board and everything after it is yours. This is the usual baseline in Asian trade.
• DAP, Delivered At Place. The seller delivers to the named place. You clear the import and pay the duty and tax.
• DDP, Delivered Duty Paid. The seller delivers cleared, with duty paid. This is how we sell: one number, to your door.

Two things people reliably get wrong. An Incoterm without a named place is incomplete: FOB on its own means nothing, FOB Ningbo means something. And under CFR and CIF the seller pays for the sea leg although the risk already passed at the origin port, so a container lost at sea is your loss against their freight invoice.

The other eight terms, and why EXW usually costs more than it looks, are in EXW vs FOB vs DDP.

How the goods actually move

• FCL, a whole container. The box is yours and nobody else loads into it. Priced per container, not per cubic metre, so the fuller you pack it the cheaper every unit inside becomes. A half empty container costs the same as a full one. Sizes are the 20ft, the 40ft and the 40ft high cube.
• LCL, shared space. Your pallets travel with other people's, priced per cubic metre or per 1000 kg, whichever is greater, which is why dense and bulky goods are quoted so differently. It adds a consolidation step at each end, so it spends longer in terminals than the sea leg alone suggests.
• Air. Priced on chargeable weight, not on what the scale says: the greater of the actual weight and the volume in cubic centimetres divided by 6000. Light bulky goods therefore cost far more by air than people expect.
• Rail. China into Europe, between sea and air on both cost and time. Worth asking about when the sea schedule does not fit and air is out of proportion to the value of the goods. Not every origin, not every commodity.

Demurrage and detention: the two clocks at the destination

When a container lands you get a limited amount of free time. After it runs out, two separate charges start, and they are not the same thing.

• Demurrage runs while the container is still inside the terminal and has not been collected.
• Detention runs once the container has left the terminal and has not been returned empty.

Both are almost entirely avoidable, and both are avoided the same way: by having the paperwork complete and the entry ready before the vessel arrives rather than after. Nearly every demurrage bill we have seen was a document problem wearing a storage charge as a disguise.

The papers a shipment needs

Three documents travel with every shipment. A few more depend on the goods, and the ones that depend on the goods are the ones that get forgotten.

• Always. The commercial invoice, which says what was sold to whom for how much on which terms, and which customs values the shipment from. The packing list, with weights and dimensions per carton. And the transport document, a bill of lading by sea or an air waybill by air.
• Often. A certificate of origin, which says where the goods were actually made and not always where they shipped from. And proof of preferential origin, a EUR.1 or a statement on origin, when a trade agreement gives a lower rate. No proof means the full rate applies.
• Depending on what is inside. ISPM 15 treatment stamps on wood packaging, pallets and crating, or the shipment is refused at the border. A safety data sheet for chemicals and for the many products containing them. UN38.3 test reports for lithium batteries, including batteries already built into a product, with the dangerous goods paperwork and labelling that goes with them.

Customs: the code decides the cost

Every traded product has a tariff code. The first six digits are the same worldwide, under the Harmonised System. After that each market extends it: the European Union to eight digits for export and ten for import under TARIC, the United States to ten under HTSUS.

That code decides the duty rate, which means the code decides the cost. Two codes that describe your product almost equally well can carry very different rates, and the one you choose is the one you have to be able to defend. This is work, not a lookup.

The valuation difference in the second row is the one that surprises people. The same goods on the same vessel carry a higher customs value arriving in Rotterdam than arriving in Los Angeles, because the European Union counts the freight to the border inside the value that duty is charged on. Nothing about the shipment changed. Only the rule did.

If being approximately right is not good enough, both markets sell certainty: a Binding Tariff Information decision in the European Union, a ruling from Customs and Border Protection in the United States. Each gives you a classification the authority is bound by. It takes time and it is worth it for a product you will import for years. We are not your customs broker, your lawyer or your accountant, and we will tell you plainly when you have reached the point where that is what you need.

How the duty is then worked out, with a worked example for both markets, is in How import duty is calculated.

Product rules that stop a shipment at the border

Duty is the cost people plan for. Compliance is the cost that strands a container. Goods sold in the European Union may need CE marking, REACH and RoHS compliance, food contact declarations, EN71 for toys, or labelling rules for textiles and footwear. The United States has its own set, and for some products its own testing.

The paperwork belongs with the goods at entry, not after a phone call from the terminal. Finding out at the port is the expensive way to learn which certificate was missing.

What we do, and what we do not

We arrange the whole journey door to door, we file the entry through a broker in the destination country, and we sell it to you as one delivered price with duty and tax included. You deal with us, not with a forwarder, a broker and a trucker separately.

What we will not do is give you a freight rate, a transit time or a duty percentage that nobody on our desk has actually checked. A number invented to sound helpful costs you real money at the border. Where we hold a current price for a lane, you get it. Where we do not, we say so and a person prices it.