Customs for eCommerce brands

• Duty at the door

  Customers refuse parcels when they’re asked to pay unexpected charges.

• Labelling and product rules

  Goods sold in India need compliant labels and, for some products, BIS approval.

• Returns

  Sending goods back across borders is slow without the right paperwork.

• Stock far from customers

  Shipping every order from abroad makes delivery slow.

• Bulk imports for eCommerce

  A consolidated consignment arrives on one Bill of Entry with duty settled in a single assessment; after that, every order is a domestic dispatch from a Lozy warehouse. The route suits products with proven demand and steady week-to-week sales, where holding stock is a choice the numbers already support. It turns the exercise from a shipping decision into a stock decision, which is the right kind of problem to have when a product is working.

• Direct-to-customer, DDP

  The DDP for eCommerce route sends each order to the buyer with duty paid before delivery, so the checkout price is the price at the door. There is no warehouse leg and no stock risk on slow movers, which makes it the natural first lane for launches and for the long tails of a catalogue. Per-unit freight is higher than on consolidated stock, and that is the trade you are consciously making rather than a hidden cost.

• Split the catalogue

  Fast sellers travel as bulk imports for eCommerce; the rest stay direct-to-customer until their numbers justify stock in the country. The split is made from real sales data rather than a forecast written before the product had a single order. Most catalogues settle into a pattern within a few cycles, and the desk keeps tuning the mix as it firms up, product by product.

• One returns lane

  Refused and returned units come back to the NCR warehouse, where they are checked and either returned to sellable stock or gathered into a return batch. Nothing sits stranded at a doorstep, and the reason for each return is recorded where the next order can learn from it. A returns lane that terminates in India is also kinder to the unit than one that has to cross a border twice.

• The duty rate itself

  It follows the HS code, and two accessories from the same supplier can sit in different tariff lines without either supplier being wrong. Classification is settled before the first order rather than discovered at the port, so the pricing built on top of it stands on something real. The desk holds the classifications it set for you and reuses them every time the product ships again.

• IGST at the border

  IGST paid at import becomes input credit for a GST-registered business, provided the entry is set up cleanly. The desk records it per consignment, so the return does not turn into an archaeology project a year down the line. If the business is not registered, the same amount is simply a cost, and the sheet says so plainly.

• Freight and clearance, per unit

  A shared container spread and an air parcel carry similar charges across very different unit counts. Weight, volume and mode decide which unit economics a product actually gets, and the desk prices the leg you chose rather than a blended average that suits nobody.

• Warehouse and last mile

  Storage, labelling and the delivery leg touch margin too. If they stay outside the landed cost, the price looks better than the business is, and the gap tends to surface at the end of a quarter. Putting them in the sheet is not pessimism; it is arithmetic.

Ask for the per-SKU sheet with its components kept separate — duty, IGST, freight, clearance — so you can see which part moves when a rate, a route or a volume changes.