In-depth guides on customs duties, landed cost, Incoterms, and international trade logistics.
Booked, packed, gated in on time — and still left on the quay. Rolled cargo is not bad luck: it is a carrier arbitrage or a missing filing. And its cost does not fall at random: the Incoterm and the letter of credit decide who absorbs it.
The tooling you paid for, the fabric you shipped to the factory, the drawings your overseas studio produced: whatever the buyer supplies free to the producer is dutiable. The four assist categories, how to value them, the three apportionment methods, and the design exception that depends on where the work was done.
A 40-foot box from Yantian to Los Angeles can cost four times what the same box costs going back. That gap is not a market glitch — it is the price of repositioning empty containers, billed to whoever ships in the full direction, and in the UK and India it is taxed along with the goods.
A trade credit policy does not insure your sales. It insures a limit per buyer, at a set percentage, after a set waiting period. Those three numbers, and two deadlines you cannot miss, decide what the claim is worth.
When a trading company sits between the factory and the importer, US Customs will still accept the factory price as the dutiable value — the EU, the UK and India will not. What the Nissho Iwai test actually demands, why the real obstacle is commercial, and three worked cases in dollars, sterling and rupees.
Factoring buys an invoice; forfaiting buys an avalised note. That difference decides what comes back to you when the buyer disputes the goods: a trade receivable stays exposed to the dispute, an abstract instrument does not.
A buying commission is the only Art. 8.1(a)(i) line that takes money out of the dutiable base — which is precisely why it is the most audited. The five tells that turn an agent into a seller, the paperwork failure that makes the exclusion unclaimable, and three worked cases in $ and rupees.
Detention does not stop when you unload, it stops when the empty is handed back. In between sits a full drayage move, forty miles to the depot and two lifts nobody quoted. A street-turn deletes that leg — when the carrier, the receiving window and the box condition all line up.
An on-demand guarantee does not protect your performance — it protects the other side's. The bank pays against a conforming demand without reading your contract, your credit line is blocked at face value, and the fee runs until someone signs a release.
A trademark or patent royalty is not just an operating expense. If the goods cannot be bought without it, it belongs in the customs value. The CBP three-question test, the Indian Ferodo line, apportionment, and how to declare a fee you do not yet know.
Being related does not make your invoice unacceptable — you have to show the relationship did not influence the price. Circumstances-of-sale test, test values, CBP Reconciliation, first sale for export and India's SVB, with worked numbers.
On an indivisible industrial package, ocean freight is rarely the line that hurts and never the one that moves the schedule. The route survey, the lifting plan, the charter party and the DSU policy decide — and the first three have to be settled before the equipment is ordered.