Selling from Canada into the US? Here's how to calculate your true landed cost

For Pro Industrial Equipment, 60% of revenue comes from the US. When US–Canada tariffs started changing, one question became urgent: what does each product actually cost once it’s sold in the US? Not the supplier price. The real number, after everything. Here’s how we built the answer for a 30,000-product catalog.

Why your cost is probably wrong

Most Canadian sellers price their US listings from their Canadian cost plus a margin. That ignores everything that happens at the border and after it. On a few products, the gap is small. On thousands of SKUs, it adds up, and some best sellers quietly start losing money on every order.

The 7 pieces of landed cost

1. Product cost. What you paid for the item. This is also the value you declare at the border.
2. Duties. Set by the product’s tariff classification: the HS code, or HTS code on the US side. The right code matters. A wrong one means a wrong rate, or a shipment held at the border. Products that qualify under CUSMA rules of origin may get preferential treatment, so check each one.
3. Extra tariffs. Special tariffs on top of regular duties, such as Section 232 duties on steel and aluminum content. For industrial products, this can be the biggest line.
4. Customs fees. The Merchandise Processing Fee (MPF), a small percentage of value with a minimum and a maximum per entry, and the Harbor Maintenance Fee (HMF) when goods arrive by sea.
5. Cross-border transport and brokerage. Getting the goods across the border to your US warehouse or to Amazon.
6. Fulfillment. US parcel shipping to the customer for FBM orders, or FBA fees for FBA.
7. Marketplace fees. Referral fees, charged as a percentage of the selling price.

The minimum price formula

Once you know the product cost and everything else per unit, the price that hits your target margin is:

An example with round numbers, not real rates: a product costs $40. Duties, tariffs, customs fees, transport and fulfillment add $15 per unit. You want a 20% profit and the referral fee is 15%.

• Minimum price: (40 + 15) ÷ (1 − 0.20 − 0.15) = $84.62
• Break-even price: (40 + 15) ÷ (1 − 0.15) = $64.71

Below $84.62, you miss your target. Below $64.71, you lose money on every sale. Now picture a repricer racing a competitor down to $59 on that SKU, every day, without knowing either number.

Why it has to be automatic

A spreadsheet works for 20 products. It doesn’t work for 30,000, and the inputs never stop moving: tariff rates, fee schedules, exchange rates. So we built two tools:

• An HS code tool that keeps codes, rules and fees current for the whole catalog. Building it ourselves saved more than $10,000 compared with paying an outside agency to classify the products.
• A true-cost engine that recalculates every SKU when a tariff or fee changes and turns the result into a pricing strategy for the repricer.

The same data now also generates the US customs manifests automatically. That work used to take 30 to 60 minutes a day.

What to do this week

1. Pull your top 50 US sellers by revenue.
2. Confirm the HS code for each one.
3. Calculate the landed cost with all 7 pieces above.
4. Compare it with your current price, and flag anything under its minimum price.

Most sellers find a few best sellers losing money. Fix those first, then automate the rest.