Duty-inclusive pricing on Shopify, affordably

Showing a US shopper one price that already includes duty is the cleanest cross-border experience available. It is also achievable without enterprise tooling, provided you get the classification right first.

Why duty-inclusive beats a checkout line item

A shopper who sees $68 and pays $68 behaves differently from a shopper who sees $58 and then watches it become $68 at the last step. The second experience reads as a surcharge even when the total is identical.

Duty-inclusive also removes the awkward middle state where the customer is told fees may apply, which is the worst of both options: no clarity and no protection.

Classification comes first, not pricing

A duty-inclusive price built on wrong HS codes bakes in the wrong number permanently. Get the codes and origins right per SKU before you touch pricing.

Check CUSMA eligibility at the same time. Padding your US price with duty you are not actually paying on qualifying goods means you are overcharging US customers and losing sales for no reason.

Setting the markup

Compute duty per SKU at its real rate, then add the structural fee component — the carrier’s disbursement or advancement charge for prepaid entry — because that applies to every parcel regardless of duty.

Set your US price from the sum, and then watch the reconciliation. Quoted versus billed by SKU tells you within a month whether the markup is holding or whether a particular product line is underwater.

Keeping it cheap

The cost of this approach is almost entirely the classification maintenance, which is roughly constant regardless of your revenue. That is why a flat fee is the natural price for it and a percentage is not.

If you have the capacity, do it yourself. If you do not, pay a flat fee for it rather than a share of every US sale — which is precisely what LiteLanded is.