What your order actually costs delivered
A factory quote gets goods onto a vessel. It does not get them into your warehouse. Put your FOB price in below and this works forward through freight, duty, inspection and testing to the number you should actually be pricing against.
Your order
$12,420 total · $4,420 on top of the $8,000 factory price
Where it goes
- Goods (FOB)
- 2000 pcs × $4.00
- $8,000
- Freight & insurance
- Your forwarder's quote
- $2,200
- Duty @ 19%
- Assessed on FOB value — $8,000
- $1,520
- Third-party inspection
- 1 man-day(s) × $300
- $300
- Lab testing
- Colourfastness, shrinkage, composition
- $400
- Landed total
- $12,420
Above the 25–40% band. Common causes: air freight instead of sea, a high-duty HS code, or a small order carrying fixed inspection and testing costs across few units.
An estimate for planning, not a quotation. Duty depends on the HS classification of your specific product — confirm it with a licensed customs broker before you price a range around it.
The four things FOB leaves out.
FOB — free on board — means the factory buys the materials, makes the garment, clears it for export and loads it onto the vessel. That is where the quote ends and your costs begin. Four line items then sit between the port of origin and your warehouse, and all four are predictable enough to budget before you commit to a quantity.
Freight and insurance depend on route, season and how full the container is. Sea is the economical choice; air costs roughly 8 to 12 times more per kilo and exists to rescue a late order, not to carry a plan. Duty is set by your product's HS classification and your destination — and is assessed on a different value base depending on which country you are importing into, which is the part most calculators get wrong. Third-party inspection runs about $250 to $400 per man-day. Lab testing for colourfastness, shrinkage and fibre composition is required by law for children's wear in most markets and by most retailers regardless.
Added together on a first order, those four typically put landed cost 25 to 40 percent above FOB. That band is the sanity check at the bottom of the result — if your figures land outside it, the assumptions are usually wrong rather than the order being unusually cheap or expensive.
Why the destination changes the duty base
The United States assesses duty on transaction value, which for an FOB purchase excludes the international freight you pay. The EU and UK assess on CIF, so that freight is itself inside the value being taxed. Same order, same rate, larger base in Europe. This calculator applies whichever basis matches the market you select — the per-market duty positions behind those defaults are set out in full on our sourcing by market pages.
Go deeper
What a garment really costs to make breaks the FOB price itself into fabric, trims and cut-and-make. Import duties and customs covers what a first-time buyer actually pays, and FOB, CIF or DDP explains which shipping term moves these costs onto us instead.
About landed cost.
Want the real numbers for your order rather than an estimate? Send the spec and we'll cost it properly.
Or let us quote it delivered.
We ship FOB, CIF or worldwide DDP — on DDP the duty, freight and clearance above are ours to manage, and you get one number with nothing left to chase.