← Import landed cost calculator
Names no specific product or company — this compares a free calculator against the generic method most importers already use: a personal or shared spreadsheet with a formula for duty and fees typed in once and copied down.
| Question | Spreadsheet formula | This calculator |
|---|---|---|
| Merchandise Processing Fee floor/ceiling | Usually a flat percentage typed once — the $32.71 floor and $634.62 ceiling on formal entries are easy to forget and silently wrong at the edges | Applies the floor and ceiling on every calculation, on the current published CBP figures |
| Harbor Maintenance Fee | Either always applied or always omitted, depending on what the sheet's original author shipped | Toggled by an explicit ocean-freight checkbox, applied only when checked |
| Formal vs. informal entry | Usually one formula per sheet, not switched per shipment | A single toggle switches the whole MPF calculation between the two schedules |
| Per-unit cost and tariff burden % | An extra column you have to remember to add and keep in sync with the total | Computed automatically alongside the total |
| History across shipments | Its actual strength — a running log with supplier, tracking number, and margin per shipment | Prices one shipment at a time; does not replace a shipment log |
| Shareable single scenario | Requires sending the whole file or a screenshot | One link, via "Copy shareable link," with no file attached |
Neither tool determines your HTS classification, your actual duty rate, or your compliance obligations — both are arithmetic on numbers you already have, and both are only as accurate as the rates you type in.
Plenty of importers do, and a spreadsheet is a fine tool for tracking a history of shipments over time. The failure mode is not the spreadsheet itself — it is the Merchandise Processing Fee's floor and ceiling and the Harbor Maintenance Fee's ocean-only condition, both of which are easy to type once and forget to update when a shipment's value crosses the floor, the ceiling, or the ocean-vs-air line. A calculator that recomputes those conditions on every input avoids that particular drift; a spreadsheet formula copied down a column does not check itself.
Not necessarily. This tool prices one shipment at a time and does not save a history across sessions the way a spreadsheet's rows do. Many importers use both: this calculator to get one shipment's arithmetic right, including the MPF/HMF edge cases, and their own spreadsheet to log the result alongside supplier, tracking number, and margin for every shipment over a season.