A cost figure with no stated method is a marketing claim. This page exists so you can judge how much weight to put on ours.
Where the data comes from
When someone uses our sourcing tool, we match their description against live supplier offerings, translate the specifications, and cost each match for their destination and shipping mode. That work is done to answer their question. These pages are what is left afterwards, in aggregate.
What has to be true before we publish a category
- Enough independent demand. A category page is only created once the same normalized category has been searched by a meaningful number of separate buyers over a rolling 90-day window. One buyer's interest is not a category.
- Enough supply-side data. A minimum number of distinct matched products and distinct suppliers, so a band reflects a market rather than one factory's pricing.
- Nothing identifiable. Figures are aggregated across independent searches. Where a category is thin enough that a single buyer's specification could be inferred, we do not publish it.
- Something worth saying. A person who does this work writes the cost drivers, the failure modes and the hub guidance. Numbers alone are not a page.
The fourth condition is the one that keeps this honest. Anything that can be generated without a human is generic, and generic pages help nobody — including us.
How a landed cost is built
| Goods | Aggregated from matched supplier offerings for the category, at the quantity tier shown. Outliers at both ends are discarded before the band is taken. |
| Agent fee | Our own fee at the structure that would apply to an order of that size. |
| Freight | Modelled from prevailing rates for the destination and mode, using the category's typical cartonisation — volumetric where the product is bulky, weight-based where it is dense. |
| Duty | Applied at the rate for the category and destination shown. |
What these figures are not
- Not quotations. Nobody is offering to sell you anything at these prices, including us.
- Not a substitute for classification advice. Duty depends on how your specific product is classified, which is the importer's responsibility.
- Not stable. Freight rates and material costs move. Every page carries the date it was last rebuilt; treat an old one with suspicion.
- Not applicable to your exact product. A category band cannot know your dimensions, materials or certification requirements. The tool can — run it.
What we deliberately leave out
Supplier names, source listings and any figure traceable to one buyer or one factory. The first two are the asset our clients pay us to build. The third is a confidentiality obligation, and we would rather publish fewer pages than get that wrong. The commitment is set out in our Privacy Policy.
Corrections
If you have bought in one of these categories and our band does not match what you actually paid, tell us — including the quantity and destination. Real invoices beat models, and we would rather correct a page than defend it.
