If you price international products off the supplier invoice alone, you are guessing. The invoice tells you what you paid for the goods; it says nothing about what it costs to get one sellable unit onto your shelf. The landed cost formula turns "what we paid" into "what it truly costs", and it is short enough to memorize.
The formula
Landed cost = goods + freight + insurance + duty + import tax + fees.
Landed cost per unit = landed cost ÷ units in the shipment.
Six buckets. Each one is simple; the discipline is in not skipping any, because the skipped bucket is always where the margin went.
What belongs in each bucket
- Goods. The supplier invoice for the units themselves, plus anything that legally belongs in the customs value: assists (molds or tooling you supplied), certain royalties and commissions.
- Freight. Everything that moves the shipment: origin trucking, ocean or air, destination trucking. On split invoices, sum them; per-unit math punishes forgotten legs.
- Insurance. Small, boring and real. Cargo insurance usually runs a fraction of a percent of value, and it belongs in the total.
- Duty. Customs value times the duty rate for your code and origin. The rate belongs to the tariff code, which is why classification quality is landed-cost quality. The full chain is in how to calculate import duty.
- Import tax. VAT or GST where the destination charges one, usually on the duty-inclusive value. Registered businesses often reclaim it later, but it is still cash at the border and belongs in cash-flow math.
- Fees. Customs brokerage, port and terminal handling, container fees, exam fees, bond costs, payment and FX costs. Individually small, collectively a real line.
A worked example
A DTC brand imports 1,000 stainless steel water bottles from China to the United States at $4.80 a unit.
| Bucket | Amount | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Goods | $4,800.00 | 1,000 × $4.80 |
| Freight | $1,150.00 | Ocean plus trucking both ends |
| Insurance | $38.00 | Cargo policy on the shipment |
| Duty | $96.00 | 7323.93 household steel articles, 2% × $4,800; origin surcharges checked separately |
| Import tax | $0.00 | No US federal import VAT |
| Fees | $410.00 | Brokerage, terminal handling, bond |
Landed cost: $6,494.00, or $6.49 per unit. The invoice said $4.80; reality says $6.49, a 35 percent difference. Price a $19.99 retail product off $4.80 and the margin model is fiction. And one construction detail lurks in the duty line: make that bottle vacuum-insulated and it changes heading, with a different rate, which is why the classification deserves a check before the spreadsheet does.
What people forget
- The per-unit denominator. Divide by sellable units, not shipped units. Damage, QC failures and samples shrink the denominator and raise the real per-unit cost.
- Origin surcharges. Trade-remedy tariffs on specific origins can dwarf the general duty rate. They belong in the duty bucket the moment they apply to your lane.
- FX and payment costs. If you paid the supplier in another currency, the spread and fees are part of the goods cost.
- Returns and last-mile in DDP. Selling delivered-duty-paid to consumers means the duty and tax bucket lives inside every checkout price; get the rate wrong and every order compounds it.
Run your own shipment
The landed cost calculator is this exact worksheet, live: seven fields in, the per-shipment and per-unit truth out, computed in your browser. For the duty rate field, describe the product to the classifier demo first and it will return the code, the rate estimate and the reasoning behind it. From there, pricing decisions stand on the whole formula instead of the first bucket.