The four places money leaves
An overseas order is not one transaction. It is a purchase, a conversion, a shipment and a customs entry, and each one has its own charges.
- The seller takes the item price and the international shipping charge, in their currency. If they price with a domestic VAT or consumption tax built in, some sellers strip it for export and some do not, and only the checkout page will tell you which.
- The card converts. The rate it uses is not the mid-market rate you looked up, and most cards add a foreign transaction fee on top. If the store offers to bill you in dollars instead, that is dynamic currency conversion done at the merchant's rate, and it is usually the more expensive of the two options.
- Customs may assess duty. Whether it does, and at what rate, depends on how the goods classify, where they were made, and what measures are in force at the moment the entry is filed.
- The carrier charges for clearing the entry and for fronting whatever was owed. Those fees are separate from the duty itself and are often billed after the parcel has already been delivered.
Why every rate on this page is a blank field
The rules that decide what a parcel owes are not stable, and they are not the same for every parcel. Duty-free thresholds for low-value shipments have moved, been suspended for particular origins, and been applied differently by service level. Tariff rates depend on a classification code that is genuinely difficult to assign — the difference between two adjacent codes can be several percentage points. Trade measures are added and removed by executive action, sometimes with days of notice.
Any calculator that hard-codes a threshold or a rate is telling you a number that was true on the day it was written, presented as though it were true today. This one refuses to do that. The fields are empty on purpose, and the sensitivity table exists so you can see how much of the answer rides on the figure you cannot look up yourself. The carrier can quote you a landed cost, and US Customs and Border Protection publishes the current rules; both are worth consulting before you commit, not after the invoice arrives.
Sales and use tax does not go away
Buying from abroad is not a way around state sales tax. States that levy sales tax generally levy a matching use tax on goods brought in for use in the state, and larger foreign marketplaces increasingly collect it at checkout. Whether delivery charges are taxable varies by state, which is why that is a separate checkbox rather than an assumption baked into the arithmetic.
What the comparison against a domestic price leaves out
| Cost | Domestic | Imported |
|---|---|---|
| Returning a wrong or faulty item | Usually a prepaid label | International return postage, sometimes exceeding the item |
| Warranty | Honoured locally | Frequently void or serviceable only in the origin country |
| Delivery window | Days | Weeks, and a customs hold has no schedule |
| Compatibility | Sold to local standards | Voltage, plug, frequency band, firmware region can all differ |
| Recourse if it never arrives | Straightforward | Depends on the seller and on what the insurance covers |
A five percent saving on the landed cost does not survive one return. That is the practical reason the calculator flags a narrow margin rather than declaring a winner.
Before you place the order
Get the carrier to put a landed-cost figure in writing, confirm with your card issuer what it charges on a foreign transaction, and check the current import rules for the goods you are actually buying rather than a category that sounds similar. Those three calls take less time than an unexpected brokerage invoice takes to resolve.
Questions people ask
Why does the calculator not tell me the duty-free threshold?
Because it changes, and it has changed recently and more than once. A figure written into a page today is a claim about the world that stops being true without the page noticing. The threshold, whether it applies to your origin country, and whether it applies to the shipping service you chose are questions for the carrier or for Customs and Border Protection on the day you buy.
What duty rate should I enter?
Whatever the carrier or a customs broker tells you for the specific goods, or 0 if you have been told the shipment will clear free. If nobody has told you anything, run the sensitivity table and look at the spread — that spread is the size of the uncertainty you are carrying, and it is often worth one phone call to remove.
Is duty charged on the shipping cost?
It depends on the valuation basis the entry uses, which is why it is a choice on the form rather than an assumption. Ask the carrier which basis it files on for your service level. On a low-value item with expensive freight the difference is not trivial.
The carrier billed me weeks after delivery. Is that normal?
It is common. Express carriers routinely advance duty and taxes on your behalf to keep the parcel moving, then invoice you afterwards for the amount advanced plus their own fee for advancing it. A doorstep delivery with nothing to pay is not evidence that nothing is owed.
Should I split a large order into several parcels?
That decision depends on rules this page deliberately does not encode, and shipments split to stay under a threshold can be treated as a single consignment. Price the options honestly with the carrier instead of assuming a split works.