How do I know my true landed cost per order?

Last updated: June 27, 2026

Your true landed cost per order is the unit cost of goods plus inbound freight per unit, plus duty, plus the merchandise processing fee, charged to the order before payment fees and outbound shipping. Duty equals the HTS rate times the customs value. Since the US de minimis suspension, even parcels under 800 dollars now owe that duty.

Most landed cost calculators were built for a world that ended in 2025. The old calculators assume small imports clear duty-free, they bury the merchandise processing fee, and they compute customs value the European way. This post gives you the full landed cost formula, fixes those three gaps, and runs the math on a real product down to dollars left.

What is true landed cost per order, exactly?

True landed cost per order is every cost to get one order's goods from the supplier's dock onto your shelf ready to sell, expressed per order. Landed cost includes the unit cost of goods, the inbound freight to move it, the duty owed at import, and the merchandise processing fee. Landed cost excludes outbound shipping to the customer and payment processing, because those are sale costs, not sourcing costs. Keeping that line clean matters, because landed cost is the COGS number every downstream margin calculation depends on.

The landed cost formula, per order, is:

Landed cost per order = (unit cost of goods + inbound freight per unit) × units in the order + duty + merchandise processing fee

Duty and the merchandise processing fee attach at the import event, so both are easiest to allocate per parcel or per entry rather than baked into a per-unit rate. The next four sections build each term.

The four parts of landed cost

1. Unit cost of goods

Unit cost of goods is what you pay the supplier for one unit, in the supplier's currency, converted at the rate you actually paid. Use the price on the commercial invoice, not the quoted list price, and net out any volume rebate you genuinely receive. The invoice figure also drives your customs value, so getting it exact pays off twice.

2. Inbound freight per unit

Inbound freight per unit is the cost to move goods from the supplier to your warehouse, divided across the units in that shipment. Take the full inbound bill, ocean or air freight, drayage, and the customs broker's fee, and divide by the units on the shipment. A container of 4,000 units carrying 6,200 dollars of inbound freight adds 1.55 dollars per unit. Allocate by unit when the goods are similar and by value or volume when a shipment mixes very different SKUs.

3. Duty (HTS rate times customs value)

Duty is the import tax, and for most goods it is ad valorem, meaning duty equals the HTS rate times the customs value. The HTS rate comes from the ten-digit Harmonized Tariff Schedule code for your product, published by the United States International Trade Commission. Two nuances trip up almost every calculator.

First, the customs value. The US assesses duty on the transaction value on an FOB basis, which excludes international freight and insurance, per U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The FOB basis differs from the EU and UK, which assess duty on a CIF basis that includes freight and insurance. If your calculator adds ocean freight into the dutiable value, the calculator is using the European method and overstating your US duty.

Second, the threshold. The old rule that imports under 800 dollars clear duty-free no longer holds. The US 800-dollar Section 321 de minimis threshold is suspended, so formerly de-minimis parcels now owe normal duties, paid by the importer or consignee and usually collected by the carrier or broker, per U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The suspended threshold is why a 54-dollar parcel that used to skip duty now carries it.

4. The merchandise processing fee

The merchandise processing fee, or MPF, is a per-entry US customs charge that most calculators omit entirely. CBP sets it for FY2026 at a flat 2.69 dollars on automated informal entries, and at 0.3464 percent of entered value on formal entries with a 33.58-dollar minimum and a 651.50-dollar maximum. Informal entry covers most shipments under 2,500 dollars, so a single small parcel typically pays the flat 2.69 dollars rather than the percentage. The MPF is charged per entry, so allocate it across the units on that entry.

How did de minimis change my landed cost?

The de minimis change raised your landed cost on every low-value imported order, because parcels under 800 dollars that used to clear duty-free now owe the HTS rate on their customs value plus the MPF. The US de minimis suspension ended duty-free treatment in stages: for China and Hong Kong on May 2, 2025, and for all countries on August 29, 2025 under Executive Order 14324, per U.S. Customs and Border Protection. CBP made the suspension indefinite in interim final rules published June 24, 2026, and the change is repealed by statute, permanently, effective July 1, 2027.

The legal ground shifted too. The Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA reciprocal tariffs on February 20, 2026, so CBP re-grounded the de minimis suspension in the Tariff Act of 1930, while Section 232 metals tariffs and Section 301 China tariffs remain in effect. The practical takeaway for your landed cost is plain: a parcel under 800 dollars is no longer duty-free, and you owe the HTS rate on its customs value plus the MPF. For the full chain of who actually pays that duty, see who pays duty after the de minimis suspension.

A worked example: a stoneware mug set of four

Take a stoneware mug set of four that sells for 54 dollars on your store. You import the set from a supplier in Asia, one set per direct-to-consumer parcel. Here are the real inputs, fresh for this product.

Input	Value
Selling price	54.00
Unit cost of goods (per set, commercial invoice)	14.00
Inbound freight per set	3.10
Customs value (FOB transaction value)	16.00
HTS rate, stoneware mugs (representative MFN)	10%
Entry type	Automated informal (under 2,500 dollars)

A note on the rate. Stoneware mugs classify under HTS 6912.00.44, "Mugs and other steins," which carries a representative MFN ad valorem rate of 10 percent in the 2026 USITC Harmonized Tariff Schedule. Confirm the exact ten-digit HTS code for your own mugs with your customs broker before pricing, because a wrong code is the most common landed cost error.

Now build the landed cost line by line.

Duty equals the HTS rate times the customs value, on an FOB basis. The customs value is the 16.00 transaction value, and US rules exclude the international freight, so duty is 10 percent of 16.00, which is 1.60 dollars. The merchandise processing fee on an automated informal entry is the flat 2.69 dollars.

Landed cost component	Amount
Unit cost of goods	14.00
Inbound freight per set	3.10
Duty (10% × 16.00 customs value)	1.60
Merchandise processing fee (informal flat)	2.69
True landed cost per order	21.39

Now carry it to dollars left. Subtract landed cost, then the sale costs that landed cost correctly excludes: payment processing and outbound shipping.

Order economics	Amount
Selling price	54.00
True landed cost per order	-21.39
Payment processing (2.9% + 0.30)	-1.87
Outbound shipping to customer	-7.40
Dollars left after the sale	23.34

The mug set leaves 23.34 dollars per order, about 43 percent of the 54-dollar price. Here is the figure to take away, and the reason this post exists. Under the old duty-free assumption, you would have booked a landed cost of 17.10 dollars and walked away thinking you kept 27.63 dollars. Duty and the MPF together add 4.29 dollars to every order, computed as 1.60 plus 2.69. That 4.29 is 15.5 percent of the 27.63 you thought you had, gone on a parcel your old calculator treated as duty-free. At 600 of these orders a month, that is 2,574 dollars a month, computed as 4.29 times 600, leaking out of a line most stores never updated after de minimis ended.

The post-de-minimis nuance most calculators still get wrong

Three errors sit inside almost every off-the-shelf landed cost tool, and each one understates what an imported order really costs.

Common calculator error	What it does to your number	The correct treatment
Treats sub-800-dollar parcels as duty-free	Drops the duty line entirely	Apply the HTS rate to the customs value on every import
Omits the merchandise processing fee	Misses 2.69 dollars on each informal entry	Add the flat 2.69-dollar MPF per entry
Computes customs value on the CIF basis	Inflates duty by taxing freight and insurance	Use the FOB transaction value, US rules exclude freight

The CIF error and the de minimis error pull in opposite directions, which is why a sloppy calculator can land near the right total for the wrong reasons and then break the moment freight or the duty rate moves. Get each line right on its own and the order stays correct as inputs change.

How do I find my own true landed cost per order?

Find your own true landed cost per order by pulling five numbers per SKU and running the four-part formula. You need the commercial invoice unit cost, the inbound freight allocated to that unit, the customs value, the HTS rate, and the entry type. Here is the order of operations.

1. Get the unit cost from the commercial invoice, in the paid currency at the rate you actually paid, not the supplier's list price.
2. Allocate inbound freight by taking the full inbound bill, including drayage and the broker fee, and dividing across the units on that shipment.
3. Set the customs value on an FOB basis. Use the transaction value and exclude international freight and insurance, because the US is not on the CIF basis the EU and UK use.
4. Look up the HTS rate for your ten-digit code in the USITC Harmonized Tariff Schedule, and confirm it with a broker before pricing. A wrong code is the most common landed cost error.
5. Add the MPF for your entry type: the flat 2.69 dollars for an automated informal entry under 2,500 dollars, or 0.3464 percent within the 33.58 and 651.50 dollar bounds for a formal entry.

Add the four terms and you have landed cost per order. Then carry it through payment fees and outbound shipping to dollars left, exactly as the mug example does. Once landed cost is right, it becomes the COGS input for every downstream cut, including your true net margin end to end and which SKUs turned unprofitable after tariffs.

What it costs to skip this

Skipping the duty and MPF lines understates landed cost on every imported order, and the error hides because it sits inside COGS. On the mug set the gap is 4.29 dollars an order, which an aggregate P&L never flags, because the duty arrives weeks later on a carrier or broker invoice, detached from the order that owed it. Multiply a 4.29-dollar miss across a catalog of imported SKUs and a few thousand orders a month and you have five figures a year of margin you priced away without knowing. The fix is one-time per SKU and it pays back the first month. Who carries the duty also depends on your shipping terms, which is the difference between DDP and DAP under Incoterms 2020.

Where Agentis fits

Building this formula once in a spreadsheet gives you today's landed cost. Keeping it accurate as HTS rulings change, freight moves, and duty rules shift again before the July 1, 2027 permanent repeal is the hard part, and that is where real-time enforcement earns its place.

Profit governance is the practice of monitoring and enforcing margin rules in real time across every order, SKU, and channel, so unprofitable activity gets caught and corrected as it happens instead of discovered in a month-end report.

Agentis is a real-time profit governance platform for high-volume Shopify Plus and ShopLine merchants. It monitors margin at the order and SKU level and flags or blocks unprofitable activity before it reaches the P&L. For landed cost, that means the duty and MPF on an imported order get charged against its real contribution the moment the entry posts, so a SKU whose margin quietly turned negative after de minimis ended surfaces on its own instead of hiding inside a freight-and-duty total you reconcile a month late.

Start today without any tool. Pick your three best-selling imported SKUs, look up their HTS rates, and add the duty and MPF lines to their landed cost. If any of the three were sold on the old duty-free assumption, you just found a margin leak you can reprice this week.

Frequently asked questions

What is included in true landed cost per order?

True landed cost per order includes the unit cost of goods, inbound freight allocated per unit, duty, and the merchandise processing fee. It excludes outbound shipping to the customer and payment processing, because those are sale costs rather than the cost of landing the goods. Landed cost is the COGS number your margin math should use.

Do imports under 800 dollars still owe duty in 2026?

Yes. The US 800-dollar Section 321 de minimis threshold is suspended, so parcels under 800 dollars now owe normal duties, paid by the importer or consignee and usually collected by the carrier or broker, per U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The suspension is indefinite, and de minimis is permanently repealed for commercial shipments on July 1, 2027.

How is US customs value calculated for duty?

US customs value is the transaction value on an FOB basis, which excludes international freight and insurance, per U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That is the key difference from the EU and UK, which assess duty on a CIF basis that includes freight and insurance. Duty then equals the HTS rate times that FOB customs value.

What is the merchandise processing fee and how much is it?

The merchandise processing fee is a per-entry US customs charge. For FY2026 CBP sets it at a flat 2.69 dollars on automated informal entries, and at 0.3464 percent of entered value on formal entries, bounded by a 33.58-dollar minimum and a 651.50-dollar maximum. Informal entry covers most shipments under 2,500 dollars.

Why is my landed cost higher than my calculator says?

Most calculators predate the de minimis suspension, so they treat small imports as duty-free, omit the merchandise processing fee, and often compute customs value on the EU CIF basis instead of the US FOB basis. Fixing those three gaps usually raises landed cost by several dollars per order on imported SKUs, exactly the 4.29 dollars added to the mug set above.