Affiliate disclosure: this article contains affiliate links. If you subscribe through them, UAE Info Portal may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Ask a UAE trader their margin and they will usually quote the gap between supplier invoice and selling price. Then freight, five percent customs duty, clearance, delivery order fees, transport and storage quietly eat a third of it. Landed cost — the true cost of getting each unit to your shelf — is the number that decides whether an import business is actually profitable, and most spreadsheets calculate it wrongly or not at all.
What matters here
- All-in unit cost — supplier price plus every shipment cost, allocated down to the individual item.
- Sensible allocation — freight spread by weight or volume, duty by value; splitting equally across lines flatters heavy cheap goods and punishes light expensive ones.
- Costs arriving late — the clearance invoice lands weeks after the goods; the system must absorb it into stock already received.
- Margins from landed cost — selling prices and profit reports built on the true number, not the supplier invoice.
The main options
Odoo Inventory handles landed costs natively: shipment costs — freight, duty, clearance, insurance, handling — are recorded against a receipt and allocated across its products by the method each cost deserves, adjusting stock valuation item by item. The purchase side of the shipment lives in Odoo Purchase, late-arriving cost invoices are captured as bills in Odoo Accounting and linked back to the shipment, and the paper trail — BL, packing list, customs declarations, certificates — files against the same records in Odoo Documents for the day customs or the auditor asks.
How to choose
Take your last three shipments and rebuild them honestly, all costs in. Almost every trader finds products they believed profitable that are not — usually the heavy, cheap, container-hogging lines. Reprice from the landed number, and from then on refuse to release a shipment's margin report until its costs are attached. Discipline here is worth more than any sourcing negotiation.