What importing from China really costs, landed in Australia.

Landed cost is what one sellable unit costs by the time it's on your shelf, everything included. Here's the anatomy for an Australian importer, line by line — structural, not quoted: your numbers depend on your product, your volumes and current rates, and anything we estimate on a real program is labelled as an estimate.

The lines that make the number

Unit price — the factory quote, at a named incoterm (see our incoterms explainer; quotes on different terms aren't comparable). Tooling — moulds and fixtures, paid up front and honestly amortised across realistic volumes, not optimistic ones. Freight — sea for margin, air for speed; the gap between them is large enough to change a product's viability, and peak-season rates move. Insurance — small, skipped by people who later wish they hadn't.

Duty — many Chinese-origin goods enter Australia at reduced or zero duty under the China–Australia Free Trade Agreement, but only with correct origin documentation, and product categories differ: classify properly and verify current rates with your broker. GST — applied on the landed value (goods plus freight, insurance and any duty), claimable for GST-registered businesses but real for cash flow. Clearance and port charges — customs brokerage, terminal and handling fees. Local delivery — port to your warehouse or 3PL. And beneath all of it, the quality line: inspection costs, and the expected cost of the rework or rejects that inspections exist to prevent — the line that never appears in the optimistic spreadsheet.

The mistakes that flatter the spreadsheet

Comparing unit prices across different incoterms. Amortising tooling over the volume you hope for rather than the volume you've ordered. Budgeting sea freight, then air-freighting the launch batch because the schedule slipped. Forgetting GST applies to the freight too. Treating inspection as an optional cost instead of insurance priced at a fraction of the shipment it protects. Each one makes the early spreadsheet prettier and the first reorder uglier.

Working it properly

Build the landed cost before committing to tooling, pressure-test it at half your forecast volume, and re-run it when anything material changes — freight mode, order size, term. On our programs this model is a standing deliverable of the production & freight practice, and the feasibility version appears even earlier, in strategy & research — because the kindest time to learn a product doesn't work commercially is before it exists.