Landed cost and duty, explained

The four parts

Unit price. What the factory charges per jacket. This is the only number most suppliers will give you, and on its own it is not enough to plan a margin.

Freight. Air or sea, and the difference is weeks rather than days. A leather jacket is roughly 1.5 to 2 kg packed. At small quantities freight can add 15% or more to the unit price; at scale it becomes almost invisible.

Duty. With most suppliers, payable by you on arrival as the importer of record. Rates depend on the garment and its materials, and they are not small: a leather jacket from Pakistan is around 16% at the moment, a cotton hoodie around 26.5%, a polyester satin jacket higher still. We publish the estimated rate and the HTS code for each product rather than leaving you to find out at the border.

Broker and handling fees. Small, but real, and usually unannounced.

A worked example

Fifty leather jackets quoted at $70 a piece sounds like $3,500. Add air freight and you are near $4,300, which is $86 a jacket. Add US duty at the rate in the table below — 16% on the value of the goods — and the broker fee, and you are near $5,000: about $100 a jacket, not $70. If you priced your retail off $70, a third of your margin went to a number nobody mentioned.

That is why we publish an all-in price. One figure, duty inside it, nothing collected at the door — and the duty-unpaid price published beside it if you would sooner clear the goods yourself.

How to avoid it

Ask every supplier for the delivered price to your address, in writing, and ask them what duty rate applies to the specific garment. If they cannot tell you, they have never shipped to a US buyer who asked — which is worth knowing before you send money.

We publish both numbers for exactly this reason: an all-in price with freight and duty inside it, and the duty-unpaid price beside it with the rate and HTS code for the garment.