Landed Cost For Jewelry Businesses.
The price on a supplier's invoice is not what a piece costs you. Landed cost adds everything it took to get the piece onto your shelf — and for imported jewelry, that difference decides whether your margins are real.
Updated
What Landed Cost Includes
Landed cost is the supplier's price plus every cost of bringing the goods in. For jewelry that usually means:
- Freight and secure shipping
- Insurance in transit
- Customs duty and import taxes that you cannot recover
- Customs brokerage and clearance fees
- Currency conversion costs and bank fees
- Assay, hallmarking or certification charges paid on arrival
A Worked Example
A shipment of 20 pieces is invoiced at $10,000. Freight and insurance come to $250, duty and brokerage to $450. The landed cost of the shipment is $10,700 — 7% more than the invoice. A piece invoiced at $500 really cost $535.
Price that piece at keystone from the invoice ($1,000) and you believe you made a 50% margin. Measured against its landed cost, the margin is 46.5%. Across a year of imports, that gap is real money.
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| Supplier invoice | $10,000 |
| Freight and insurance | $250 |
| Duty and brokerage | $450 |
| Landed cost | $10,700 |
| Uplift over invoice | 7% |
Allocating It To Each Piece
Shipment costs have to be spread over the pieces in the shipment. The two common methods are by value (each piece carries a share in proportion to its invoice price) and by weight (useful for costs that scale with weight, such as some freight). Allocating by value is the simplest and the most common for jewelry, since duty and insurance usually follow value.
Actual Or A Standard Percentage?
You can calculate landed cost exactly for each shipment, or set a standard percentage per supplier from experience and apply it to everything you buy from them. Exact allocation is more precise; a standard percentage is far easier to keep up and is usually close enough, provided you review it when freight or duty changes.
Duty Depends On The Goods
Duty rates depend on how the goods are classified, what they are made of, where they come from and where they are going. They change. Check current rates with a customs broker rather than relying on a figure from a previous shipment.