What does one unit really cost, landed?
A landed COGS calculator tells you what one unit truly costs once it reaches your warehouse: the ex-factory unit cost plus freight-in per unit plus import duty plus any other per-unit landing costs. That landed figure, not the factory invoice, is the honest COGS to use in every margin calculation, and this tool computes it live from your numbers.
The per-unit price on your supplier invoice, before any landing costs.
Freight per unit, if you already know it. Or flip the toggle and spread a whole freight invoice.
Freight invoice total, then units in the shipment. = $2.00 freight per unit
Import duty from the customs entry, as a share of unit cost. = $0.50 per unit
Inspection, compliance testing, inbound insurance, port and broker charges, spread per unit.
The SKU's current price, to read landed COGS as a share of price. Set to 0 to skip.
Freight, duty and other landing costs add $3.00 - 30% - on top of ex-factory cost.
Five inputs, straight off the paperwork
Every number this tool needs already exists in your stack. Pull each one from the document that created it, in order, and the landed figure at the end is one your accountant would recognise.
From the supplier invoice or purchase order in your purchasing or inventory system: the ex-factory price per unit, before anything else.
From the freight forwarder's invoice. Enter the shipment total and the units it covered, or a per-unit rate if you already carry one.
From the customs entry or broker's invoice: the duty rate applied to your goods, as a percent of unit cost.
From the rest of the landing paper trail: inspection, compliance testing, inbound insurance, port and broker charges, divided by units.
From your store: the SKU's current price. Optional, but it turns the landed figure into a share of every selling dollar.
The whole method is one addition
Landed means cost plus freight-in plus duty. The factory invoice is only the first line: every cost it takes to put the unit on your warehouse shelf belongs in COGS, because every one of them leaves with the unit when it sells.
Same definition as The Math: landed means cost plus freight-in plus duty, and CM1 = revenue − landed COGS. Ex-factory cost alone makes the margin read fatter than it is.
One unit leaves the factory at $10.00. Freight-in adds $2.00 per unit, your per-unit rate taken directly. Duty at 5% of unit cost adds $0.50, and other per-unit costs add $0.50.
Landed COGS per unit = $10.00 + $2.00 + $0.50 + $0.50 = $13.00. The landing costs are $3.00 the factory invoice never showed: 30% on top of ex-factory cost. At a $40.00 selling price, the landed unit takes 32.5% of every selling dollar before discounts, fulfilment or fees.
These are your live inputs from the calculator above, not a canned example. Change a number up there and this paragraph follows.
Margins priced ex-factory are fiction
CM1 = revenue − landed COGS. Feed that formula the factory invoice instead of the landed figure and every margin downstream of it reads fatter than it is: freight and duty quietly move from cost to imaginary profit. Three decisions run on the honest version.
The gap between selling price and landed COGS is the pool everything else is paid from. Price against ex-factory cost and the pool is smaller than you think before the first order ships.
A supplier quote is compared landed or not at all: a cheaper factory price that ships from further away, at a higher freight rate or duty band, can land dearer than the one you have.
Your break-even ROAS floor is built from contribution margin, and contribution margin starts at landed COGS. Understate the COGS and the floor reads lower than the truth, so ads that lose money look fine.
Where the napkin math stops
This calculator beats the common shortcut, a flat multiplier on factory cost, because freight and duty do not move in step with factory price. But it is still one SKU and one shipment at a time, and it hides real differences of its own.
Honest limits of a blended landed cost
Per-SKU landed cost feeding real margin
When the napkin version breaks down, the fix is not a better multiplier: it is running the real cost per SKU, continuously. Blufire computes CM1 on landed COGS from Shopify cost data, with COGS coverage and confidence shown, so you can see exactly which SKUs have an honest cost behind their margin and which are still running on guesses.
S7 Products & Inventory carries margin by SKU with returns economics: the landed unit followed all the way through to what it actually contributes, including the ones that come back.
Run it before the price is set
Landed cost is not a number you compute once. It moves every time a shipment books, so the protocol is tied to the events that move it.
Run it with the freight quote and duty rate in hand. The price is a decision about the landed unit, not the factory one.
Swap the quote for the forwarder's and broker's actual invoices. If the landed figure differs from the cost your margin math carries, update that cost field the same day: from that moment your dashboards are wrong by the difference.
Freight and duty are repriced by the market between orders. A launch plan built on last shipment's landed cost inherits last shipment's freight rate.
Walk the highest-volume SKUs through the calculator. The trigger for action is drift: when landed as a share of price has risen to where it no longer leaves the contribution your break-even ROAS needs, reprice, re-source or stop pushing the SKU.
Questions operators ask
Unit cost plus freight-in plus duty, plus any other per-unit cost of getting the unit to your warehouse: inspection, compliance, inbound insurance, port and broker charges. It is the same definition The Math uses for CM1: landed means cost plus freight-in plus duty, and CM1 = revenue minus landed COGS.
No. Outbound shipping and pick/pack belong in fulfilment, one rung further down the step-down, and ad spend sits further down again as variable marketing. Landed COGS only covers what it costs to get the unit to your shelf, not to the customer's door.
Dividing the freight total by the number of units is the simplest honest spread, and it is what this calculator does. Be aware of what that hides: an even spread gives a heavy, bulky SKU the same freight share as a small one, so for mixed pallets a weight- or volume-based allocation is fairer. If one SKU dominates the container, run it alone.
Because freight and duty do not move in step with factory price. Freight is priced by weight, volume and route, duty by product category, so a single multiplier calibrated on one shipment is wrong SKU by SKU in both directions, and it goes stale the first time a freight rate or duty band changes. The multiplier feels like a cost model; it is really last year's shipment wearing a formula.
In this calculator, yes: duty is computed as your duty rate times the unit cost, which is the common simple case. Customs valuation rules differ by country and product classification, so if your entry works differently, take the actual duty paid off the customs entry, divide it by units, and put it in the other per-unit costs field instead.
It is the COGS line in CM1: CM1 = revenue minus landed COGS, the first rung of the step-down from revenue to true margin. From there, take the landed figure into the contribution margin calculator and step the rest of the order down: discounts, shipping and fulfilment, payment and platform fees, returns.