What are the total costs involved in importing?
In addition to the cost of the product, you will have the following: 1. Customs duty. This is your country’s tax on imported product. In the U.S. customer duties range between 1% and 30+%, depending on the product class. The average is probably around 5%. Your customs broker can tell you the duty rate for your product. 2. Customs broker fees. On average, about $100.00 – $150.00 per shipment. 3. Inland freight from the port of entry to your door. 4. Document Destination charges (also known as DDC). This is the port of entry’s handling charge and it varies from port to port. In general DDC fees run about $30.00 per ton. 5. Labor/forklift fee to unload your shipment from the container. On average, about $40.00 per shipment. 6. Bond fee. This is required by US Customs to back up payment for the duty tax. Bond fees are set by the dollar value of the shipment. The minimum bond fee is usually around $50.00 and from there the cost increases by some $4.00 per thousand dollars of invoice value.
