How is a monthly bill for an imported consignment built up?

Two separate quotes sit behind it. Storage is priced on a published basis - industrial space from ₹12 per sq ft per month, commercial space from ₹13, an inventory-led plan from ₹4,499 per month and short-term storage from ₹699 per month, all GST-invoiced and billed monthly. Customs filing, duty, taxes and examination charges are quoted apart from the rent and itemised in writing, so a storage rate is never mistaken for a landed cost.

What should I check on a site before a container is de-stuffed there?

Check that a spotted 20- or 40-foot trailer reaches the dock face, that the yard has room to turn it, and that a bay can be cleared and closed off for sorting. Then ask where a mixed, floor-loaded container would be emptied on a busy day. Clear height, rack capacity against your own crates or drums, and the fire NOC belong on the same visit, not a second one.

What documents does Lozy need before the cargo lands?

Typically the commercial invoice, packing list, bill of lading or airway bill, your IEC, the into-bond or home-consumption entry as applicable, and any product licence the goods need. Where stores sit in bond a bond is signed with customs, and release later needs an ex-bond entry, while re-export needs a shipping bill. The desk sends a checklist for the specific cargo before it arrives rather than after.

How does the shipping calendar change my storage requirement?

Vessel and rake schedules move volumes in lumps, and festive import peaks stack several consignments into the same fortnight. Because billing is monthly with no long lock-in, space can be taken for the weeks a consignment is in the country and released once it has cleared and dispatched, instead of holding a full year of floor area against two busy months.

Which mistakes cost EXIM buyers the most money?

Paying duty in full on a range whose slow lines sell over many months, when bonded storage would have deferred it. Letting the free period at the port or depot run out and absorbing container detention. De-stuffing into a general bay so no lot can be traced back to its entry. And accepting a rent receipt rather than a GST tax invoice, which quietly surrenders the input credit across the year.

How long before a vessel berths should the warehouse be booked?

Confirm the bay before the vessel sails, not after it grounds. The de-stuffing slot, the dock, the return of the empty inside its free period and the choice between duty-paid and bonded storage all have to be settled around a schedule you do not control. Booking weeks ahead also lets a surge consignment be held in the same facility rather than parked wherever there is room.

Can one consignment be stored partly in bond and partly cleared?

Yes. Goods can be cleared lot by lot, so one bill of lading can be split: what a buyer needs ships out against an ex-bond entry with duty paid on that quantity only, and the remainder stays in bond. Two dates then govern the plan - most goods may stay in bond for up to a year, and interest on the deferred duty begins after 90 days in bond, so clearances are usually timed inside both.

Who else stores imported and export-bound cargo at Lozy?

Mostly businesses whose goods arrive in containers or air freight: auto-component and machinery importers, hardware and fastener traders, textile and garment houses, and distributors holding cleared stock before allocation to orders. Exporters use the same bays in the other direction, staging consignments and picking faces ahead of a stuffing date and a vessel cut-off, often out of the same facility.

Guide

Import Export Warehousing: Container De-Stuffing, Duty Trail and Site Choice (2026 Guide)

By Lozy Editorial · 17 Oct 2026

Inside a Lozy warehouse in Chennai - clear-span steel roof, bare concrete floor and stretch-wrapped palletised consignments

Import export warehousing is the work between a consignment landing at a port or inland depot and its last dispatch out of a warehouse: de-stuffing a container into a counted, documented bay, holding the cargo while duty and paperwork catch up, and releasing it lot by lot as orders arrive. Lozy runs that stretch with the customs desk and the storage bay under one roof - import export warehousing for the goods, customs clearance and filing for the paperwork, bonded storage where duty should wait. Space starts at ₹12 per sq ft per month.

Key takeaways

Lozy files and clears through the Delhi NCR depots - Tughlakabad, Patparganj, Dadri, Garhi Harsaru, Ballabhgarh, Patli, Rewari, Palwal, Sonepat and Panipat - and at IGI Airport.
Cleared cargo moves into a duty-paid bay; cargo whose duty should wait goes into bond, where most goods may stay up to a year and duty falls due only on the lots you clear.
Industrial space starts at ₹12 per sq ft per month, commercial space at ₹13, an inventory-led plan from ₹4,499 per month and short-term storage from ₹699, GST-invoiced and billed monthly.
The costly mistake is de-stuffing a sealed container into an open general bay with no lot count and no seal record - the hour a customs file and a stock ledger stop agreeing.

Auto componentspallets Machinerycrates Electronicscartons Fasteners and hardwaredrums Textiles and garmentsbales Household and kitchen linescartons

77+warehouses

1M+sq ft live space

₹12per sq ft / month

Import and export cargo is not one kind of goods; it is goods with a schedule attached. A container carries a detention clock from the moment it leaves the vessel, a freight station works to a short free period, an entry has to be filed and assessed before anything is examined, and a purchase order has a date that moves for none of it. Warehousing here is judged on a question ordinary storage never faces: whether every hour of the cargo's life can be explained by a document. The law is published by the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs, and the filing runs on ICEGATE.

How a consignment travels from the port gate to a bay

Follow one container. It is discharged at a gateway port or lifted from an air cargo complex and, depending on the incoterm and the schedule, either cleared there or moved inland by rail or road to a depot nearer the delivery city - in Delhi NCR, Tughlakabad, Patparganj, Dadri, Garhi Harsaru, Ballabhgarh, Patli, Rewari, Palwal, Sonepat or Panipat, or IGI Airport for air freight. The Bill of Entry is filed, the goods are assessed, duty is paid and an Out of Charge order is issued; only then does the cargo leave. Lozy's customs desk clears through those depots and the major gateway ports, and acts as Importer or Exporter of Record where a business has no Indian set-up.

The warehouse enters at the next step, one of two ways. Cleared goods travel on a delivery order to a bay holding duty-paid stock, where they are de-stuffed, counted and put away. Goods whose duty should be deferred travel into a bonded zone instead, under customs control, until an ex-bond entry is filed for the lots you want. Both are legitimate answers; the illegitimate version is arriving at the wrong one by accident, because duty paid at the port cannot be un-paid. Whichever route the cargo takes, the hour it is de-stuffed is the hour its record is created - what arrived under which entry, in what condition, how many units, and where each lot went.

Container de-stuffing: the hour the record is decided

A 20-foot container of mixed cargo is not a neat pallet load. It is loose cartons, half pallets, drums and crates, often floor-loaded at origin with little separation between SKUs. Pulling it apart needs a bay that can be cleared and closed off, a forklift, floor space for the stock to sit while it is counted, and one person whose only task is the count. Done at a cordoned dock that is a shift; done across a shared floor it is a day and a half and a number nobody will sign. The import export warehousing page sets out what those bays are built for.

The bay, and why it is not the general floor

A de-stuffing bay must be empty of other clients' stock before the container doors open, because what comes out first is a spreading pile of cartons with no aisle between them. It needs dock height and approach for the container to be spotted, yard room for the trailer, and clear floor to sort a mixed load into lot stacks. Most of all it has to be a space that can be shut - an imported container is a customs file in transit, and leaving it spread across a shared aisle is how cartons end up inside another company's stack.

Count, condition and seal, then the empty

Three things are recorded before anything is put away. The seal number on the door is read and matched to the transport document as the seal is broken, because that line proves the cargo on the floor is the cargo that was loaded. Cartons, drums or crates are counted against the packing list, line by line rather than by eye. Condition is photographed where it is found - a crushed carton, a torn bag, a dented rim, water staining - and written on the same sheet as the count. Skip any of the three and an insurance claim becomes an argument about whose word counts. The empty then matters too: it has a return window at its depot, and a bay that is slow to release it leaves the importer paying detention on a box that carries nothing.

The duty and document trail that follows the goods

Imported cargo is stored under a document chain, and every link points back to one file. What belongs in it - and what a receiver may ask for - separates a warehouse that can hold EXIM cargo from one that can only hold boxes.

What travels with the consignment

The set usually starts before the vessel sails: commercial invoice, packing list, bill of lading or airway bill, the Importer-Exporter Code held with DGFT, and any product-specific licence the goods require. On arrival the entry is filed, the goods assessed, duty paid and an Out of Charge order issued; the delivery order then carries the cargo to the bay. The storage file gains the intake count, the lot record and the dispatch notes by which goods leave, and in bond it also carries the into-bond and ex-bond entries and the bond signed with customs.

Why a general bay breaks the trail

De-stuff onto a general floor and the trail stops at the door. No lot number ties a carton back to the entry that cleared it, no intake sheet shows its condition as it was unpacked, and there is no answer to an audit six months later beyond recollection. That cost is invisible in the first month, which is why it keeps happening: the rate looks the same and the work looks quicker. It appears later, when a buyer wants one lot from one entry, or when a duty or IGST recovery position has to show what came in under which entry and what became of it.

CFS and ICD coordination: filing to the rake, not the calendar

A container freight station sits at the point of entry, where the container is de-stuffed, examined and its contents handled for customs. What it sells is speed at the gateway and a place for examination, not somewhere to keep cargo for six weeks while orders build.

An inland container depot is a dry port: the container moves inland and the entry is filed there rather than at the coast. For a Delhi NCR buyer that changes the arithmetic of the consignment - clearance a few kilometres from the warehouse instead of a thousand, a drayage leg short enough to schedule in hours, a container returned to a depot close by. Garhi Harsaru, Tughlakabad and Dadri carry most of the NCR traffic, and the belts around them are where an EXIM warehouse should sit; the Gurgaon guide, the Faridabad guide and the Uttar Pradesh guide cover those clusters.

Neither of the costs that surprise EXIM buyers is the rent. One is container detention, charged once the free period at the port or depot runs out - a clock unrelated to how full the warehouse is. The other is drayage, the short truck legs between port, depot and warehouse that return on every consignment. Both are settled by timing, which is why the bay is confirmed before the vessel berths.

Storage between arrival and clearance

There is a stretch this trade owns and most warehousing writing skips: the days or weeks when goods have physically arrived but are not yet free to be sold. Some of the delay is administrative - assessment pending, a classification query, an approval awaited - and some is commercial. Either way the cargo needs a position that keeps it whole, counted and identifiable until clearance lands.

Two rules carry the weight. Keep uncleared stock physically apart from released stock, so nothing is picked by mistake. Keep lot numbering continuous from intake sheet to dispatch note, so goods can be handed over the day the Out of Charge arrives. Space is rarely the constraint, because this holding is small in footprint and long in duration - which is why short-term storage from ₹699 per month, or an inventory warehousing plan from ₹4,499 per month, often fits an arrival-to-clearance gap better than a rented floorplate.

When bonded storage is the right answer

Bonded storage is the one option here that changes when money leaves your account rather than where the pallet sits. Duty and IGST wait; you pay on the quantity you take out, at the rate in force on the day the ex-bond entry is filed. Three situations point at it. Cash flow: where duty on a full consignment is large and the goods sell over months, paying only on what clears spreads the outflow against actual sales. Optionality: goods can leave from bond on a shipping bill and be re-exported with no Indian import duty payable. Batching: a consignment on one bill of lading serving several orders can be cleared lot by lot, with the rest staying in bond.

Two dates shape any bond plan, both published on Lozy's own customs bonded warehouse page: most goods may stay in bond for up to a year, with the Commissioner able to extend that, and interest on the deferred duty begins once goods pass 90 days in bond. Lozy's bonded service covers into-bond and ex-bond filing, bonded storage, part clearances, re-export from bond, bond-to-bond transfers, and inspection or sampling in bond with customs permission. Those rules sit in the warehousing provisions of the Customs Act, 1962 and can change, so re-check the dates with the desk before a consignment sails. Where a requirement mixes bonded and ordinary storage, the bonded warehouse guide treats the topic on its own.

What import export warehousing costs

Lozy publishes starting rates against the service each one belongs to, because an average quoted without its basis misleads. Four figures cover most EXIM requirements:

Industrial space - from ₹12 per sq ft per month on the industrial warehousing page, the basis for bulk cargo, drums and palletised import stock with dock access.
Commercial space - from ₹13 per sq ft per month on the commercial warehousing page, priced by floor area for a dedicated or lockable bay.
Inventory-led storage - from ₹4,499 per month on the inventory warehousing page, where a consignment is tracked as a running ledger by lot rather than as rented area.
Short-term and month-by-month space - from ₹699 per month on the short-term storage page, or flexible space through the on-demand warehouse service, for the gap between arrival and clearance.

All four are starting rates, billed monthly and invoiced with GST, with no long lock-in; the published bases sit together on the pricing page. Customs charges are itemised separately in writing, so duties, taxes and the desk's fee can be read apart from the rent - a storage rate is not a landed-cost figure.

What moves the number in this trade

Whether the space is bonded. Bonded storage is a different service from duty-paid storage, carrying the filing and control that customs supervision requires.
Handling intensity. A floor-loaded mixed container costs more labour to unpack, count and re-palletise than a load arriving on clean, uniform pallets.
Basis, footprint and distance. Floor area is priced per square foot, an inventory-led plan per month, a lockable room per unit - and space on the Garhi Harsaru side is not the same asset as space across the region.

Rent attracts GST and a registered business claims input credit when the invoice is raised as a tax invoice in its own name; the rules are on the GST portal and your accountant can confirm how they apply to your entity.

Own godown, duty-paid warehouse, bonded bay or a 3PL

These four routes answer different questions, and the right one often changes with the shipment rather than with the business.

Decision	Own godown	Duty-paid warehouse	Bonded bay	3PL partner
What you commit to	A lease, usually multi-year	Month by month	The bond period, per lot	A service contract on volume
When duty is paid	At the port, before storage	At the port, before storage	On each lot as you clear it	Per the contract's terms
Money before the first carton	Deposit, racking, staff, security	No fit-out; space from ₹12 per sq ft per month	Onboarding and the warehousing bond	Setup and systems integration
When a consignment is delayed	You carry the whole delay	Space is billed whether it moves or not	Duty waits, interest clock runs	Held only if the contract allows it
Re-export option	Duty already paid	Duty already paid	Open, on a shipping bill	Depends on the partner's setup
Stops making sense when	Volumes are lumpy or seasonal	Every consignment needs the same treatment	The stock is already cleared for sale	Customs and stock control both sit outside your hands
Usually best for	A settled importer with its own team	Cleared cargo landing on a rhythm	Large duty bills, batch clearance, possible re-export	A brand outsourcing the whole channel

Plenty of EXIM businesses run two of the four side by side: a bonded position for lots that will clear in stages, a duty-paid bay for stock already released. What matters then is that the lot records join up.

How to choose a site for EXIM cargo - and the red flags

Work back from the gateway your cargo lands at and the depots it clears through, then test the building against the way imported stock behaves. If you would rather have the check run with you, the import export warehousing team walks through it before you commit to a visit.

Dock height and approach. A container on a trailer is not a tempo. Confirm the face takes a 20- or 40-foot box, that the yard has room to spot and turn it, and that the approach road has no restriction that only appears on a loaded day.
A bay that can be closed off. Ask where a mixed container would be emptied on a Tuesday with the shed full, not in an empty shed.
Bonded space on the same premises. If duty deferral is plausible for any part of the range, having bond and duty-paid bays under one roof removes a transfer and keeps one lot record in one place.
The document routine at intake. Ask to see the seal number, count sheet and condition photographs from one recent de-stuffing. Shown a register cover rather than an entry, the control is verbal.
The empty's return and the invoice. Ask who schedules the container back to its depot, and get GST treatment, the notice period and what the customs desk charges separately into the written quote.

Red flags to walk away from

A general bay offered as a de-stuffing bay. Open the container into shared stock and the intake record will be approximate and the damage claims unprovable.
No seal record at break. One line of paper ties the goods on the floor to the container that carried them.
"We can sort the bond out later." The election between duty-paid and bonded storage has to be made before the entry is filed, not after the goods are on a rack.
A storage rate with customs charges left out. Filing, duty, examination and delivery have to appear somewhere in the written quote, not on the first invoice.
Long distance from your gateway. A shed that saves a couple of rupees per square foot and adds an hour of drayage each way has taken it back by the second container.

A worked example: an auto-components importer clearing at Garhi Harsaru

Take the case as representative rather than as a named account. An importer of auto components buys from two suppliers in East Asia; consignments land at a western gateway port and move inland by rail to the depot at Garhi Harsaru, west of Gurugram, then truck to a rented godown on the Sohna side. Stock sells through steadily, but the godown is one open floor with no separate bay, and the fourth consignment of the quarter is due before the third has been dispatched.

Written down, the problem is not space but sequence. The open floor cannot hold a de-stuffed mixed container and a live dispatch operation at once; the last intake count was done by two people on two sheets; and duty was paid in full at entry on a range whose slow-moving lines will take five months to sell. Three changes fix all three. A bay with a dock that can be cleared and closed takes the intake out of the dispatch aisle. A running lot record by entry links every carton to the consignment it arrived on. And moving the two slowest families into bonded storage shifts their duty to the month they actually sell.

The site that wins is a Lozy facility in the Garhi Harsaru corridor: close enough to the depot that a container can be de-stuffed and returned inside its free period, dock-side so a spotted trailer does not block the yard, and able to hold both bonded and duty-paid stock so the lot record stays in one system.

How Lozy handles import and export cargo

Import and export warehousing at Lozy sits next to the customs desk rather than at the end of a phone chain, across a network of 77+ warehouses and more than a million square feet of live space. Consignments are de-stuffed into a cordoned bay with the seal number, the line-by-line count and the condition photographs recorded before put-away; stock is held lot by lot, with uncleared and released goods kept apart; and dispatch runs on written instruction. Cleared goods move into a duty-paid bay, and duty can wait in bond where the shipment calls for it, with into-bond and ex-bond filing handled by the same team. Billing is monthly on a GST invoice with no long lock-in, so a bay can be taken for one consignment and released after it.

Adjacent verticals share most of the handling problem and are worth reading before you call. The manufacturers guide covers raw material and component storage beside a production line, the B2B distribution guide deals with trade-channel supply at volume, and the 3PL partner guide is written for operators holding someone else's inventory. If you are comparing service shapes first, the warehouse for rent guide and the inventory warehousing guide each set out a basis in plain terms, and the Haryana corridor guide covers the depot belt state by state.

The warehouse listing is the live view of what is free today. To compare the full range, the services page lists everything from a single rack position to a bulk floorplate with dock access. And when you have a consignment, a gateway and a date, the contact page comes back with rates and availability, usually within the working day.

Inside a Lozy warehouse in Chennai - clear-span steel roof, bare concrete floor and a row of stretch-wrapped palletised consignments along the wall — A Lozy facility in Chennai, photographed as it stands: a clear-span steel structure with red sprinkler lines along the trusses, daylight through the wall openings onto a bare concrete floor, and a single row of stretch-wrapped cartons on pallets staged along the wall. This is the shape an EXIM buyer should be judging - clear floor enough to empty a container into, and a dock face where a spotted trailer can stand.

Related guides

Storing imported or export-bound cargo?

Send the consignment, the gateway and the date - we reply with space, a rate and the paperwork checklist.

Get a quote Call +91 93547 12345

Sources. Rates, facility names and service descriptions are Lozy's own published information, including the customs services set out on the Lozy customs and bonded warehouse pages. Customs law is published by the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs, filing runs on ICEGATE, the IEC regime sits with DGFT, and GST registration is governed by the GST portal.

Last updated: 14 October 2026. Have a question the FAQ below does not answer? Call +91 93547 12345 or email care@lozy.in.

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