Landed Cost Calculation After Tariffs: A Worksheet

What does this product cost you?

I ask that question in almost every profit audit. And most founders answer with the number on the factory quote. Fourteen dollars. Nine-fifty. Whatever the supplier wrote down.

That number is wrong. It's always too low.

Here's the short answer. A landed cost calculation adds up everything you pay to get one sellable unit onto your warehouse shelf: factory price, international freight, insurance, duties and tariff surcharges, customs fees, broker charges and inland delivery. Then you divide by the units you can actually sell. On the hypothetical shipment in this post, a $14.00 factory price becomes a $21.00 landed cost. Price off the $14.00 and you overstate margin by $7.00 on every order.

And after this summer's tariff changes, plenty of brands are pricing on a landed cost number that was right in the spring and wrong by August.

What is the landed cost formula?

Here's the formula in one line:

Landed cost per unit = (factory price + freight + insurance + duties and tariffs + customs fees + broker charges + inland delivery) divided by sellable units.

Two words in there do most of the damage when founders skip them.

Sellable. If you order 1,020 units and 20 arrive crushed, your costs didn't shrink. They just got spread across 1,000 units instead of 1,020. Divide by what you can sell.

Dutiable. In the US, duty is generally charged on what you paid the factory, not on the freight. CBP's guide to customs value lists transportation and insurance for the international shipment as amounts excluded from transaction value. So a common import cost calculation mistake (applying the duty rate to factory price plus freight) inflates your duty line. The opposite mistake is worse: forgetting duty exists until the broker's invoice shows up.

What changed with tariffs this summer?

A lot, and it keeps moving. I won't print a rate for your product, because I don't know your product code and the stack changes month to month. But here's where things stood when I wrote this on September 30, 2026.

The IEEPA tariffs are gone and refunds are flowing through CBP's electronic claims process. On July 23, 2026, USTR took final action in its forced-labor Section 301 investigations, setting new duties of 10% or 12.5% on goods from 60 economies depending on each one's forced-labor import rules. And CBP's trade remedies page, last updated September 16, still lists active Section 232 actions on metals, autos, pharmaceuticals and more, the older China Section 301 actions, and new Section 338 duties on certain Canadian goods.

Watch what happens to a founder who built their pricing sheet in April. Different surcharge, different authority, maybe a different rate on the same SKU. If nobody reopened the sheet, every price on the store is anchored to a cost that no longer exists.

Confirm your own stack with your customs broker. This post is margin math, not customs or legal advice.

How do you calculate landed cost per unit, line by line?

Here's the worksheet. Run the math on a shipment like this, a hypothetical: 1,020 waffle-knit throw blankets at $14.00 each, ocean freight into Los Angeles, 20 units damaged in transit, 1,000 sellable. Assume your broker confirms a combined duty and surcharge rate of 21% (an 8.5% base rate plus a 12.5% Section 301 surcharge, both made up for this example).

Line item	How it's calculated	Shipment cost	Per sellable unit
Factory price	1,020 units x $14.00	$14,280.00	$14.28
Freight and insurance	ocean freight $2,400 + insurance $70	$2,470.00	$2.47
Duty and tariff surcharge	21% x $14,280 (factory value only)	$2,998.80	$3.00
Merchandise Processing Fee	0.3464% x $14,280	$49.47	$0.05
Harbor Maintenance Fee	0.125% x $14,280	$17.85	$0.02
Broker, bond and ISF filing	broker quote (hypothetical)	$345.00	$0.35
Drayage and port charges	port to 3PL (hypothetical)	$650.00	$0.65
3PL receiving	per pallet (hypothetical)	$184.00	$0.18
Total landed cost	divided by 1,000 sellable units	$20,995.12	$21.00

The two fee percentages come from CBP's user fee table, which lists the formal entry fee at 0.3464% with a $33.58 minimum and $651.50 maximum, and the harbor fee at 0.125%. Those fees adjust for inflation every October 1, so check the table before you run your own numbers.

Here's the stack, collapsed into four bars:

Product $14.28

Freight + insurance $2.47

Duty + tariff $3.00

Fees $1.25

1,020 units ordered, 1,000 sellable. Fees = processing, harbor, broker, drayage and receiving.

Notice the product line is $14.28, not $14.00. That's the 20 damaged blankets, quietly spread across the ones you'll sell.

If you'd rather not build the spreadsheet, the free calculator does the per-unit math for you:

How much margin are you losing by pricing on a stale number?

This is where it stops being accounting and starts being money.

Say the blanket sells for $58 on Shopify, and fulfillment, packaging and payment fees run $9.50 per order. Here's margin per unit three ways:

• Pricing off the factory quote: $58 minus $14.00 minus $9.50 = $34.50
• Pricing off the spring sheet (same shipment, no 12.5% surcharge, landed cost $19.21): $58 minus $19.21 minus $9.50 = $29.29
• The truth: $58 minus $21.00 minus $9.50 = $27.50

Factory quote $34.50

Spring sheet $29.29

True landed cost $27.50

Price minus cost basis minus $9.50 fulfillment and fees.

At 300 units a month, the factory-quote founder thinks they're making $2,100 a month more than they are. The spring-sheet founder is off by $537 a month, or $6,444 a year, on one product. Across a catalog of 20 imported SKUs, that gap is how you end up like the $60K store that was actually losing money.

The factory quote tells you what the product costs the supplier to sell. Landed cost tells you what it costs you to sell. Only one of those belongs on your pricing sheet.

Now look at it per visitor. Say the blanket page gets 20,000 visitors a month and converts at 1.5% with an average order value of $58. That means revenue per visitor is $0.87, and on 20,000 visitors that's $17,400 from 300 orders. Margin per visitor is $0.41 on true landed cost ($27.50 x 300, divided by 20,000), not the $0.52 the factory-quote math promised. Every ad decision you make off that $0.52 is a decision made on fiction.

Where does landed cost live in Shopify, and why is yours probably wrong?

Here's the sneaky one. Shopify's profit reports pull from the cost per item field on each product. Shopify's own guidance describes it as the price you paid the manufacturer, excluding taxes, shipping or other costs. And per the profit reports documentation, that field is static, so the report is only accurate for the point in time when you last updated it.

So if you typed $14.00 in there last year, your gross profit report has been flattering you ever since. Put the landed cost in. Then update it every time a shipment lands at a different cost. That one habit is the foundation of real ecommerce profit analytics.

AI helps here too, in a practical way. Paste your freight invoice, your broker's entry summary and your packing list into an AI assistant and ask it to allocate each charge per sellable unit and flag anything it can't match. It's fast and it catches the drayage line you forgot. But don't let it pick your HTS code or your duty rate. That's your broker's job, and getting it wrong costs far more than the broker does.

What does good landed cost math look like in real numbers?

Everything above is hypothetical. Here's a real one.

We moved an Amazon animal repellent product to its own Shopify store. Landed cost was $9.20 per unit in both places. On Amazon it sold for $49.95 and netted $17.58 per sale after fees and ads. On Shopify, the same $9.20 landed cost, a $79.95 price and a page built to sell bigger orders pushed average order value to $210.86 and net profit per sale to $134.28, after paying for ads and inventory. See the full fee breakdown on our results page. Real client numbers, not typical results, and not a promise of what your store will do.

Same landed cost. Wildly different profit.

That's the part I want you to sit with. Landed cost tells you how much margin you have to protect. The page decides how much margin you actually keep. If a tariff just pushed your landed cost up $1.79, you can eat it, raise the price, or make the page carry a bigger order. I broke down that decision in the tariff pricing strategy worksheet, and why the same product earns differently per visitor on each channel in Shopify vs Amazon revenue per visitor. The same number decides how deep you can go in Q4, so run it before you pick a Black Friday discount percentage.

A tariff raises your cost once. A page that can't defend its price charges you again on every visit.

Run your own blanket-style math below. The defaults are this post's hypothetical, with a target where a two-pack option lifts the order and the page explains the price.

What should go on your landed cost checklist?

What to do next

Open the broker's invoice for your best-selling product's last shipment and fill in the eight lines from the worksheet above. Then compare the answer to the number in Shopify's cost per item field. If they don't match, your profit reports have been wrong since that shipment landed.

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Book Your Profit Audit

Once you know your true landed cost, the next question is whether your product page earns enough per visitor to protect that margin. On a profit audit we show you where the page is leaking and how to rebuild a high-converting product sales page in less than 15 minutes.

Book Your Profit Audit →

Or go here to check it out → revenueflows.ai

P.S. Pricing off the factory quote feels like profit. Pricing off landed cost is profit. The gap between those two numbers is coming out of your pocket on every order.