Duties & Taxes

Overview

Duties & Taxes is an Add On Feature supporting duties & tax calculation for international shipping on any cross-border carrier. Flexibly choose to either collect duties, taxes, and fees along with shipping costs at checkout (Delivery Duty Paid or DDP) or give your customers visibility of the charges they’ll be responsible for paying upon delivery (Delivery Duty Unpaid or DDU). Cover the most signficant aspects of landed costs for international shipping without constraints.

The ShipperHQ Duties & Taxes feature is powered by the deep international expertise of the DHL eCommerce Americas and their Duty & Tax Calculator. This proven capability is updated in real-time as national and international rules, laws, tariffs, and taxes change and covers over 190 countries. No account with DHL eCommerce is required to use the ShipperHQ Duties & Taxes and duties and taxes calculated can be used on any carrier supported by ShipperHQ.

Add On Feature
As an Add On Feature, Duties & Taxes does not count against your ShipperHQ plan’s Advanced Feature limit but does carry an additional cost on top of your base ShipperHQ subscription. Contact us with any questions.

Requirements

  • A paid ShipperHQ account on the Advanced or Enterprise plans
  • ShipperHQ installed on a Shopify, BigCommerce, or Adobe Commerce/Magento 2 site
  • The ShipperHQ Duties & Taxes Add On Feature enabled
  • At least one Carrier in your ShipperHQ account offering international shipping
Duties & Taxes is not available while on a ShipperHQ trial. You will need to set up billing before being able to enable the feature.

Configure Duties & Taxes in ShipperHQ

Enabling the Feature

  1. In your ShipperHQ Dashboard under Advanced Features, find Duties & Taxes
  2. Enable the feature to set up billing for the add on (if you’re on Shopify, you may need to contact us to continue with setup)
  3. Review costs and confirm the updates to your total billing amount. The initial charge will be prorated for the remaining amount of time in your current ShipperHQ subscription. The Duties & Taxes Add On subscription will match the same monthly or annual term as your base ShipperHQ subscription.
  4. Once billing is confirmed, you’re ready to get started with Duties & Taxes

To manage the Duties & Taxes Add On subscription in the future, you can navigate to Billing in your ShippperHQ account. The additional Duties & Taxes amount will be itemized below your base ShipperHQ subscription amount.

Advanced Feature Settings

Once the billing details have been completed, there are a few settings to apply within the advanced feature before moving on to the carrier settings.

These settings include:

Duties & Taxes Display: This designates how you’d like to show duties & taxes:

  • DDP – Display and include duties & taxes in shipping rate: Will include the calculated duties & taxes in the amount charged for shipping
  • DDU – Display duties & taxes, but do not include in shipping rate: Show customers estimated duties & taxes but don’t include that amount in the amount collected for shipping
  • DDU – Do not display or include duties & taxes in shipping rate but note in order (Magento only): This option is available only on Magento and does not show or charge calcuated duties & taxes but instead notes the estimated amount on the order for the benefit of post-order processing

Default Country of Origin: Since Country of Origin is an aspect frequently used in setting duties & taxes, set this to the country where the majority of your products were manufactured or produced.

Pricing Strategy: It is possible to have multiple duty & tax rates for a given product, HS Code, or shipment especially when not using HS/tariff codes or when using only 6-digit HS Codes. This setting lets you tell ShipperHQ how to handle cases of multiple rates by choosing to always use the highest (Maximum), lowest (Minimum), or Average rate.

Type of shipment: Use this to set the end use for your shipments.

Once these settings have been completed, select Apply to finish up the Advanced Feature settings and proceed to carriers to add Duties & Taxes at the carrier level.

Carrier Setup

Be sure to check the methods under your carriers to ensure you have international shipping methods available. Please also double check any zones being used to restrict the carrier to make sure you are able to present rates to your desired international markets.
  1. Now that the Duties & Taxes Advanced Feature is setup, navigate to Carriers in your ShipperHQ dashboard
  2. Edit the carrier you wish to use with Duties & Taxes and go to the Fees tab
  3. Check the “Enable Duties & Taxes” checkbox to enable Duties & Taxes for this carrier
  4. Under “Payment Method” you can choose DDP (which will include the duties & taxes in the amount charged for shipping) or DDU (which will display the estimated amount but not include it in the shipping charge)
  5. Save the carrier

Product Configuration

When ShipperHQ requests duties, taxes, and fees from DHL eCommerce we include the SKUs of the products defined on your eCommerce platform for each product in the order. Optionally, for greater accuracy, we can include HS Codes (Harmonized System codes of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule or HST used to classify imports and exports) set on your products. More about HS Codes

Adobe Commerce/Magento 2

When the ShipperHQ extension is installed, it adds a new HS Code product attribute. If this attribute is not available, ensure you’re running the latest version of the ShipperHQ extension and that the attribute has been added to the attribute set you’re using.

More about ShipperHQ Attributes for Adobe Commerce/Magento 2

Shopify

HS Codes can be set on products or product variants using the “Edit Shipping Properties” option when editing a product within Shopify or via any other Shopify Metafields editor. Learn More

BigCommerce

HS Codes can be set as values of the Shipping Group field on products and product options in BigCommerce by prefixing the HS Code with “^HS:”. For example, “^HS:03.07.40” for HS Code 03.07.40. Learn More

Additional Information

DDU vs. DDP

Delivered Duties Paid (DDP) indicates that the seller pays for all duties, import clearance, and taxes. Delivered Duty Unpaid (DDU) indicates that the seller is responsible for all associated costs of transport, but when a product arrives at the destination the buyer becomes responsible for paying import duties and taxes. ShipperHQ’s integration with DHL eCommerce supports both DDU and DDP.

Harmonized System Codes (HS Codes)

Harmonized System (HS or HST) codes are commonly used throughout the import and export process for the classification of goods. The Harmonized System is a standardized numerical method of classifying traded products and is used by countries around the world to uniformly identify and describe products for purposes such as assessing duties and gathering statistics.

For more details, please visit the US International Trade Administration, DHL, or your country’s import and export authority to look up HS Codes by product type.

Once you have your product HS Codes, you can update your products with these codes to improve the accuracy of the Duties & Taxes calculations.

Supported Countries

The Duties & Taxes add on supports the approximately 200 countries and territories supported by DHL eCommerce. However, it does not support countries where DHL and/or ShipperHQ are restricted from operating including: Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Somalia, Ukraine, Yemen, or Syria.

Supported Carriers

The Duties & Taxes add on is compatible with any shipping provider which offers international services except those providers which support duties & tax calculations themselves within ShipperHQ (e.g. FlavorCloud). For these, duties & taxes will not be calculated since their rates already include duties & taxes.

For more information on ShipperHQ’s Duties & Taxes advanced feature or to learn about pricing and upgrade options, please Contact Us.

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