Landed Cost Calculator
Landed cost is what a single saleable unit costs you by the time it is checked in at an Amazon fulfillment center: the ex-works price your supplier quoted, plus import duty, plus that unit's share of ocean or air freight, customs clearance, broker fees and cargo insurance, plus prep and labeling, plus inbound shipping from the port or 3PL into the Amazon network. This calculator spreads the shipment-level charges across your order quantity and returns a per-unit landed cost, the total cost of the shipment, and the percentage uplift over the quoted price. Enter your own numbers below; the fields load with a worked example already filled in.
Calculate landed cost per unit
How the landed cost calculation works
Landed cost is an allocation problem before it is an arithmetic one. Some charges attach to each unit and some attach to the shipment as a whole, and the second group only becomes a per-unit number once you divide it by the order quantity:
- Duty per unit = ex-works unit price × duty rate. Duty is assessed on the declared customs value of the goods, which is normally the transaction value on the commercial invoice, not on what you eventually sell the item for and not on the freight you paid to move it.
- Freight per unit = total freight ÷ units in the shipment. This is the line that moves most with order size, because a container costs roughly what a container costs whether it leaves half full or full.
- Customs, broker and insurance per unit = the shipment total ÷ units. Entry filing, a continuous or single-entry bond, clearance, and cargo insurance are fixed costs of importing at all, so they behave like freight rather than like goods.
- Inbound per unit = total inbound shipping ÷ units. This is the leg from your port, warehouse, or 3PL into the Amazon network, and it now includes any inbound placement charge applied when a shipment goes to fewer destinations than Amazon requested.
- Prep per unit is already a per-unit figure: polybags, FNSKU labels, suffocation warnings, bundling labor. Factory prep is usually cheaper than domestic prep, but only if the factory gets the labels right.
- Landed cost per unit = ex-works price + duty + freight share + customs share + prep + inbound share. Multiply that by the order quantity for the total cash the shipment consumes.
- Uplift over ex-works = (landed cost − ex-works price) ÷ ex-works price. This single percentage is the cleanest way to sanity-check a new supplier quote against your existing products.
The uplift figure is what catches most sellers out. A quote that looks like a competitive win at the factory gate can arrive at the fulfillment center 50% or 80% more expensive, and the gap is widest on cheap, bulky goods where freight dominates and narrowest on small, dense, high-value goods where the product itself is most of the cost. Two products with identical quotes can land at very different costs purely because of carton dimensions.
The relationship between order size and freight per unit is the strongest honest argument for buying deeper. Moving from 1,000 to 2,000 units on the same freight bill halves the freight share of every unit. What that argument leaves out is the other side of the ledger: those extra units sit in storage, they accrue monthly fees on volume, they can cross an aged inventory threshold, and the cash tied up in them cannot be spent on the next product. Model that side with the storage and aged inventory calculator before you let a freight quote decide your purchase order.
Landed cost is also the input every other Seller Signal calculator expects. When the FBA profit calculator asks for landed product cost, this is the number it wants, not the supplier quote. When the maximum sourcing cost calculator works backward from a target margin, the ceiling it produces is a landed ceiling, so you have to subtract duty, freight, and prep from it before you know what you can actually offer a factory. Sellers who feed the quote into those tools consistently overstate margin and return on investment, then wonder why the settlement report disagrees with the spreadsheet.
One practical note on currency and timing. Duty rates, freight rates, and exchange rates all move between the day you quote a product and the day it clears customs, and a shipment ordered three months ago lands at today's costs, not the costs you modeled. Re-run this calculation at the point of reorder rather than trusting a figure carried forward from the original launch spreadsheet, and treat a landed cost older than one buying cycle as an estimate rather than a fact.
Worked example: a 2,000 unit import at $5.40 ex-works
These are the values the calculator loads with, so you can see the method and the widget agree. Figures are illustrative.
- Ex-works price $5.40 per unit, 2,000 units, freight $3,200, duty rate 12%, customs, broker and insurance $450, prep $0.35 per unit, inbound to Amazon $600.
- Duty per unit: $5.40 × 0.12 = $0.648.
- Freight per unit: $3,200 ÷ 2,000 = $1.60. Customs, broker and insurance per unit: $450 ÷ 2,000 = $0.225. Inbound per unit: $600 ÷ 2,000 = $0.30.
- Landed cost per unit: $5.40 + $0.648 + $1.60 + $0.225 + $0.35 + $0.30 = $8.523, shown as $8.52. The unrounded figures are carried through so the total matches the widget.
- Total shipment cost: $8.523 × 2,000 = $17,046. That is the cash the purchase order actually consumes, not the $10,800 on the proforma invoice.
- Logistics share of landed cost: ($1.60 + $0.30) ÷ $8.52 = 22.3%. Uplift over ex-works: ($8.52 − $5.40) ÷ $5.40 = 57.8%.
A 57.8% uplift means the quote told you barely half the story. Carry the $8.52 figure into the FBA profit calculator as landed product cost; using $5.40 there would overstate net profit by more than three dollars a unit.
Frequently asked questions
What is landed cost and how is it different from the supplier quote?
Landed cost is what one saleable unit costs you once it is sitting in an Amazon fulfillment center, ready to ship. A supplier quote is usually ex-works or FOB, meaning it covers the goods and nothing else. Everything between the factory door and the Amazon dock, which is freight, duty, customs clearance, insurance, prep, and inbound shipping, is yours to pay and yours to add.
Is duty charged on the freight cost as well as the goods?
It depends on the valuation basis your country uses. The United States generally assesses duty on the customs value of the goods, so this calculator applies the duty rate to the ex-works unit price only. Countries that use a CIF basis assess duty on goods plus insurance and freight, which raises the effective rate. If you import into more than one country, run the numbers separately for each.
Why does freight per unit fall when I order more?
Freight, customs clearance, and broker charges are largely fixed per shipment rather than per unit, so spreading them over more units lowers the per-unit share. Doubling an order does not double the freight bill. That is the honest argument for larger orders, and it has to be weighed against storage fees, aged inventory surcharges, and the cash locked up in stock that has not sold.
Should tariffs and Section 301 duties be included in the duty rate?
Yes. Enter the combined rate you actually pay, which is the base rate for your HTS code plus any additional tariff that applies to your country of origin. Sellers who enter only the base rate routinely understate landed cost by several percentage points, and that gap comes straight out of net margin on every unit in the shipment.
Which cost belongs in the profit calculator, the quote or the landed cost?
The landed cost. Every downstream figure that matters, including net margin, return on investment, break-even price, and the maximum you can pay a supplier, is built on the delivered cost of a unit rather than the quoted one. Using the quote inflates margin and return on investment and makes unprofitable products look viable.
Sources
- Amazon Seller Central: FBA inbound placement charges, partnered carrier rates, and prep requirements (primary source for the inbound leg of your landed cost).
- Seller Signal analysis. All example figures above are illustrative planning values, not current published rates. Duty rates depend on your HTS classification and country of origin; confirm them with your customs broker.