Sanitary Ware Landed Cost: What Your FOB Quote Doesn't Cover (Importer's Checklist)

Your FOB price is not your cost. Landed cost is what you actually pay to put one toilet on your warehouse floor — the FOB unit price plus ocean freight, marine insurance, import duty and tax, customs clearance, inland delivery, and a reserve for breakage and returns. Your supplier quotes the first line. The rest is yours to model, and the two biggest levers in it, container fill and the Incoterm, are fixed before the order is placed rather than after the invoice arrives.

This is the checklist we walk importers through when they ask what a container really costs, delivered.

What landed cost is made of

Landed cost is the total delivered cost of imported goods: the purchase price plus freight, insurance, duty, taxes and the fees between the port and your warehouse (Freightos).

Note which lines never move. Under FOB and CIF, duty, tax and import clearance belong to you, the importer, whatever the seller's invoice says. Under DDP they move to the seller, which is why a DDP number cannot be compared line-for-line with an FOB number.

Incoterms decide which lines are yours

The ICC's Incoterms 2020 rules are the standard trade terms that allocate costs, risk and obligations between buyer and seller in an international sale (International Chamber of Commerce). Three of them cover almost every sanitary-ware order.

Under FOB the seller clears the goods for export and delivers them on board at the named origin port, while the buyer arranges and pays the main carriage, insurance and import formalities (US International Trade Administration). CIF moves the freight and the marine insurance to the seller but leaves the duty with you. DDP moves the duty as well.

Three practical points before you choose:

• Write the named place with the rule. "FOB Yantian" is a term of sale; "FOB" on its own is an argument waiting to happen.
• Duty follows the importer of record, not the invoice. Whoever handles entry answers for how the goods are classified and valued.
• Risk passes at a different point in each rule, which changes what your marine cover has to do and who pays for a crushed carton at the destination.

Where OTOL sits: our quotations are issued on an FOB basis, and the Incoterm, origin port and validity that apply to your order are stated in the written quotation. If your costing model is built on CIF or DDP, tell us before the order is placed so the term is confirmed in the quote instead of assumed after it.

Ceramic is volume-bound, so container fill drives the freight line

Most of the ocean freight bill is charged per container, not per unit. That makes one number the one that matters:

freight per unit = freight per container ÷ units loaded

Ceramic sanitary ware is heavy but not dense. A full 40HQ of toilets normally runs well under the container's payload limit, so you run out of space long before you run out of weight. A floor-loaded 40HQ holds roughly 190–240 one-piece toilets depending on carton size and loading pattern; our container math guide walks through the calculation. Every extra unit you load cuts the freight share of every unit already in the box.

What actually changes the fill:

Three levers, in order of impact:

1. Packing density per SKU. Two-piece suites usually land more units per container than one-piece models of the same footprint, which is one reason their freight per unit is often lower. The trade-offs beyond freight — breakage, installation labour, project specification — are covered in our one-piece vs two-piece guide.
2. Floor-loading instead of palletising. Pallets unload faster and reduce handling damage, but they consume cube. Most importers floor-load ceramic and reserve pallets for fragile mixed loads.
3. Mixed-SKU fill. Dense ceramic pairs well with lighter lines — basins, brassware, accessories — that occupy leftover CBM at almost no weight cost. Our basin faucet import guide shows how fittings are specified; the current range shows what is available to fill around a toilet load.

Duty and tax: the line not to estimate from the factory

Duty and tax are set by the destination customs authority and depend on how the goods are classified, where they originate and the rules in force at the time of entry. None of that is under a factory's control, and none of it appears on an FOB invoice. Duties and taxes are part of landed cost (Freightos); the rate itself has to come from your own broker.

What to do before your first order:

• Have your broker confirm classification and duty rate for the exact product, origin and destination before the container is booked, not when it arrives.
• Ask whether additional measures apply to your product or origin — anti-dumping, safeguard or preferential origin treatment.
• Supply real technical data. Classification is done on the goods: material, function, dimensions and end use. A catalogue category is not enough, which is why we provide the technical description for the exact SKU on your order.
• Do not carry a supplier's duty figure in your costing. A duty estimate that arrives in a sales email is not a customs position.

For the exact SKU on your order we can supply the product description, material and origin data your broker needs to classify the goods. Your duty rate stays your broker's answer, not ours.

Build the per-unit number

The arithmetic is not complicated. The discipline is in refusing to guess a line.

Then, before you go back to negotiate the FOB price, compare the value of a small FOB discount against the value of loading a few more units. On a volume-bound ceramic container a better loading plan is often worth more than a percentage point on the unit price — and it costs nothing to ask for one.

Six numbers to collect before you commit the container

Ask any supplier for these, in writing:

1. Carton dimensions and units per carton for each SKU.
2. Gross weight per carton and total CBM for the order.
3. The loading plan — carton count, CBM, gross weight, floor-loaded or palletised, with a mixed-SKU breakdown if you are filling around other lines.
4. Incoterm, origin port and quotation validity.
5. The technical description your broker needs to classify the goods.
6. The document set issued with the shipment — commercial invoice, packing list, bill of lading and, where your destination offers preferential treatment, a certificate of origin.

With those six items the landed-cost model becomes arithmetic instead of guesswork.

What belongs in the written quotation

Our rule is simple: price, sample route, lead time, packing and Incoterm are confirmed for the selected SKU, quantity and destination in the formal quotation rather than in a chat message. An approved quotation states the Incoterm and named port, the SKU and configuration, the packing basis, the validity period and the documents issued with the shipment. If one of those is missing, the quote is not yet complete enough to cost the order.

Send your target models, quantities and destination port through the contact form and we will come back with a loading plan and a written quotation you can put straight into the model above.