The price you were quoted is not the price you pay

Almost every stalled import we are shown began with a quotation that was genuinely competitive. The quotation was FOB, or ex-works, and it was accurate. What it left out was not hidden — it simply was not in the document, and nobody had added it up before the order was placed.

Classification decides the duty, and you choose it before you know it matters

The tariff line is not an administrative detail applied at the border. It sets the duty rate, it decides which safety and labelling regimes attach, and in some chapters it pulls in a second charge that has nothing to do with the headline rate.

Get it wrong in your favour and the correction arrives as a reassessment with interest. Get it wrong against yourself and you pay a rate you never owed. Either way it is settled before the goods are made, not at the port.

In chapters 17 to 22 there is a second duty you have not been quoted

For goods in chapters 17, 18, 19, 21 and 22, the milk fat, milk protein, starch and sugar content pulls in an agricultural component through the Meursing table. It is a real charge, it can be substantial, and it is invisible in an ex-works quotation because the factory has no reason to mention it.

This is the single most common reason a confectionery, biscuit, chocolate or drink-mix line looks profitable on a spreadsheet and is not profitable in a warehouse.

Freight is bought on whichever of weight or cube binds first

Light, bulky goods — biscuits, wafers, cereal snacks, cushions, lampshades — fill the container long before they reach its weight limit. The container price then lands on a light payload, and the cost per selling unit is far above what a per-kilogram assumption suggests.

Dense goods have the opposite problem. Either way, the number that matters is cost per case delivered, not freight per tonne.

Then the charges that only appear once the goods are yours

Import VAT, which you may reclaim but must still finance. Port and terminal handling. Inspection, where the category or the origin triggers it. Demurrage, if a document is missing and the container sits. Re-labelling, if the artwork was not cleared before plates were cut.

None of these are unusual. All of them are routinely absent from the comparison that decided the purchase.

• Fix the tariff line in writing before you order, not after the goods ship.
• If the product sits in chapters 17 to 22, ask explicitly whether an agricultural component applies and what it is.
• Cost the container both ways — by weight and by cube — and use whichever binds first.
• Add import VAT as a financing cost even where it is recoverable.
• Price per case delivered to your door, and compare that against your shelf price. Never compare FOB to shelf price.
• Get the artwork cleared before plates are cut; re-labelling in a bonded warehouse costs more than the print run.

A landed-cost model is a page of arithmetic. It takes an afternoon and it is the difference between a line that earns and a container that sits.

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