In this episode of the Logistics Brief Podcast, Ram Radhakrishnan (Founder & CEO, Silq), chats with Graham Anderson, (Founder & CEO, Importal), to unpack the “hidden” customs costs that quietly vaporize importer margins. They break down how misclassification, sloppy documentation, poor broker coordination, and last-mile surprises turn into detention, storage, exams, rework, and chargebacks. Also learn about how a modern, tech-enabled customs workflow looks like when you actually design it to protect landed cost, not just push paperwork.

Key takeaways

• Landed cost is not a rear-view metric. You should model duty rates and tariff scenarios at product creation and export date, not when the invoice hits.
• Warehouses as a safety valve. Learn the difference between bonded warehouses and FTZs.
• Don’t let your factory or ChatGPT be your “broker.” Overseas manufacturers and generic AI prompts miss GRI rules and nuances, final classification should sit with a licensed broker.
• Refunds are on the table, but the clock is ticking. Importers can usually go back ~2 years via post-summary corrections/protests to reclaim overpaid duties, while CBP can audit entries for up to 5 years.
• Short-term games = long-term pain. Undervaluation, creative country-of-origin stories, or “duty engineering” can trigger negligence penalties of 2.5–4x the revenue loss to CBP, and even jeopardize import privileges.
• Once you’re past ~5 containers a month, spreadsheets break. You need a tech stack and a single source of truth for HTS codes, landed cost, documents, and audit trails across all shipments.
• Unify customs, even if freight is fragmented. One strong, tech-enabled broker across multiple forwarders gives you consistent classification, cleaner data, and a sane audit experience.
• Silq x Importal can pay for itself. Through factory audits, tariff modeling, and shared data in the Silq platform, importers have already saved tens of thousands of dollars in avoided duties and better routing.