The True Landed Cost of Importing from India to Canada

Almost every importer we talk to starts in the same place: a supplier quote in hand, a price per unit that looks great against what they sell for, and a plan to order. Then the goods land and the margin they were counting on has quietly disappeared. The reason is almost always the same — the ex-works price they anchored on was a fraction of the true landed cost.

Landed cost is the all-in cost to get one unit from the factory floor in India to your door (or your 3PL) in Canada, ready to sell. Get it wrong and you can be underwater before the first sale. Here is what actually goes into it.

The cost stack, line by line

• Ex-works / FOB product price — what the supplier quotes. This is your starting point, not your cost.
• Inland freight in India — moving goods from the factory to the load port.
• Ocean freight — LCL or FCL from an Indian port (Nhava Sheva, Mundra, Chennai) to a Canadian port. First quotes are rarely the real number.
• Marine insurance — typically a small percentage of cargo value, but non-negotiable if you care about risk.
• Customs duty — driven entirely by your HS classification. Get the code wrong and you over- or under-pay, and under-paying is a compliance problem.
• GST on import — 5% federal GST is assessed at the border on most goods (recoverable for registrants, but it is still cash out the door at clearance).
• Customs brokerage — brokers can bill per line item, so a multi-SKU shipment costs more to clear than you expect.
• Drayage — moving the container from the port to a warehouse or deconsolidation point.
• Last-mile delivery — final delivery to your address or fulfilment centre.
• FX — the spread between the rate you assume and the rate you actually transact at.
• Platform and storage fees — if you sell on Amazon or through a 3PL, FBA fees and storage are part of your real per-unit cost too.

The charges first-time importers forget

The headline freight and duty numbers are the ones people plan for. The ones that wreck a budget are smaller and scattered: per-line brokerage charges, port and terminal handling, container unloading labour, demurrage if the box sits too long, and the FX spread that nobody quotes you up front. Individually they look minor. Stacked together on a single shipment, they routinely add double-digit percentages to a cost model that looked healthy on the supplier quote alone.

Landed cost is only half the question

Even a perfect landed-cost number does not tell you whether the deal works. The second question — the one that actually decides profitability — is whether you can sell at a price that beats the sellers already in your market, at a volume that matters. We have watched importers nail the landed-cost math to the cent and still lose money because nobody checked the selling side first. Prove both halves before you wire a deposit.