What DDP Means for Your Order — and Why the €3 Item Duty Changes the Maths
Duty paid sounds like a shipping detail. It is actually the difference between a price you can book and a number plus a surprise six weeks later.
When a parcel arrives from outside the EU, someone has to pay the import duty and the clearance charge. Three things can happen: the seller pays and includes it in the price (DDP), the buyer pays the carrier on the doorstep, or the consignment sits in a depot until a payment is made and a form is filled in. The second and third are why people describe importing as unpredictable.
What we do instead
On our DDP lanes, duty and clearance are in the price. Your accounts team sees one number, and the customs documentation is in our name rather than yours — you do not become the importer of record and no customs debt appears on your account. For a business buying for a workshop, that single change removes the most annoying administrative step in cross-border purchasing.
The €3 per item arithmetic
The EU replaced its low-value consignment relief with a flat €3 duty per item on low-value imports. The crucial words are per item. Three separate items bought in three separate orders can attract three charges; the same three items bought as one bundle attract one. That is why we build bundles — not to inflate the basket, but because on a €45 pair of gloves and a €75 attachment, the duty is a real percentage of the price, and grouping is the only honest way to reduce it.
Why the lead times are long
Air freight costs roughly five times the sea rate per kilogram. A 5 kg tool set sent by air would carry a third of its price in freight, so most of the catalogue travels by sea: 7–14 days becomes 45–60 days. A few very light, high-value items do fly, and their product pages say so.
If six weeks is too long for what you need, the honest options are to buy locally, or to ask us about a container shipment — where the goods are billed by volume rather than by weight and heavy items become affordable again.
Why the catalogue looks different to a discount site
We pay for freight by the kilogram, and on the oversized sea lane the forwarder bills the greater of actual and volumetric weight — so a long, flat-packed handrail can cost as much to move as something far heavier, whatever the scale says. That single fact decides what we can stock and what we cannot.
Our rule is freight has to stay inside 15% of the shelf price, with 10% as the working target. On our EU sea lane that means at least €15.4 of price for every kilogram of chargeable weight; on the UK lane, about €8.6. Heavy, bulky items drop below that bar immediately — so we have delisted them. There is no four-tier rack or budget trolley jack in this shop, not because we cannot source them, but because at any price a customer would actually pay, the freight takes more than half the money.
We would rather show you a shorter catalogue than a dishonest price. A rack listed at €139 would lose money on every order; the same rack listed at €300 sells nothing. Those are the only two options on a per-kilogram lane, so we take neither and wait for container pricing instead.
Two consequences worth knowing before you ask for a quote. Consolidation is not a sales tactic: three items in one shipment genuinely cost less per item to move. And when you see a "cheap" rack with a six-week lead time somewhere else, it is usually priced on a per-kilogram lane that the seller never costed properly — the difference arrives later as a freight surcharge or a cancelled order.
How to plan an order
- Split what you need into air-lane items (compact, light, needed soon) and sea-lane items (heavy, bulky, can wait).
- Let us consolidate each group: one shipment, one duty entry, one delivery.
- Buy consumables in packs rather than singles — cloths, brushes and sensors cost less per unit and travel in the same shipment.
- Ask for a landed quote before ordering in quantity. It takes a day and it removes the variable.
