Letter from the table: The price after the quote

To the Chair and members of the Trade Council,

A question about our strategy

I want to ask a question before we turn the evidence into a standard: are we trying to make trade rules easier for a small importer to follow, or also to make the cost of carrying them out easier to know?

My answer is that we have to do both. A threshold, a plain-language guide and time to adjust can help when a new rule or tariff is introduced. But a trader can still be surprised by the bill for getting a shipment through the door. Please amend the ask for TR-001 so that landed-cost transparency is not a side note. It belongs in the proposal alongside simpler rules and a phase-in.

What happened in April

On 3 April, I asked for a transport quote for a shipment coming from outside the European Union to Marseille. I gave the forwarder the destination and the information I had about the shipment. On 6 April, I received a quote for €1,240. It described transport to Marseille as “all-in” and said customs clearance was available. It did not give me a clear list of what “all-in” excluded, or a separate estimate for the fees that might be payable at destination.

I asked by email whether the total included customs duty, clearance and terminal charges. I did not get a usable itemized estimate before the shipment was on its way. I could have delayed the order or asked for more information, but I had no reliable figure against which to weigh those options. That is the point at which uncertainty becomes a business decision, not an accounting inconvenience.

On 22 April, I received notice that the shipment had arrived in the Marseille-Fos port area. To arrange release, I was given separate amounts: €146 for customs duty, €74.40 for clearance and representation, and €98 in terminal and documentation charges. The amounts were not all the same kind of cost. Duty was a customs charge; the other two were charges for services and handling. Yet I had not been shown that breakdown when I was deciding whether the quoted price worked for me. The total of those additional amounts was €318.40, on top of the €1,240 quote.

I did not assume that customs duty could be known without the correct information. In the EU, duty can depend on such matters as tariff classification and origin. I went back to the supplier for more detail, asked the forwarder for the basis of each line, and checked the tariff information available through French Customs. I also checked how import VAT would be handled. For a VAT-registered business in France, import VAT is generally accounted for through the VAT return rather than paid to customs at the point of import; the applicable rate and calculation depend on the goods and circumstances. That accounting treatment does not make the cost disappear. It still has to be anticipated and recorded correctly.

I eventually had figures to reconcile, but only after several messages, and after the shipment had arrived. I could not use those figures to compare the original offer with another option or to make a calm decision about timing. The problem was not that every charge was improper. It was that I learned too late what the quoted total did and did not cover.

What I am asking us to change

Please amend TR-001 to include a practical transparency requirement for freight forwarders and other intermediaries involved in bringing a shipment to the importer. Before a trader commits, an estimate should separate, at a minimum:

• transport and other charges billed by the provider;

• estimated customs duties and taxes, with the assumptions or missing information that could change them;

• clearance, terminal, documentation and other third-party fees; and

• which amounts are estimates, which are fixed, and who will bill each one.

If a reliable estimate is not possible, the trader should be told what information is missing and what range or uncertainty remains. If a charge changes, the explanation should arrive before the trader is asked to pay or make a decision that could have been made earlier. A plain-language statement of exclusions would have helped me more than the phrase “all-in”.

This does not ask a forwarder to guarantee a customs decision, or to absorb a charge that belongs to someone else. It asks the provider to show the trader the difference between government charges, the provider’s own fees and charges from other parties—and to do so in time to act. Nor does it replace the need for authorities to write rules that scale to the size and capacity of small traders. These are two parts of the same problem: a business cannot plan around obligations it cannot understand, or costs it cannot see until the shipment is already there.

So my question to the Chair is this: can the Council frame TR-001 as both a call for proportionate trade rules and a call for a usable landed-cost estimate? If we do, we will be asking for more than a simpler rulebook. We will be asking that a small trader can know, before committing, what the route through that rulebook is likely to cost.