Delivered Duty Paid is the term where the seller carries the shipment all the way to your door and pays the import duty and tax on the way. It is the most complete of the Incoterms and, for that reason, the one most often quoted loosely.
What a genuine DDP price contains
- Collection from the supplier and export clearance in China
- The main carriage, whether that is air, ocean or rail
- Destination terminal charges and the import customs entry
- Import duty and import VAT or GST
- Delivery to the address you nominated
If a quote is missing any of those, it is not DDP, whatever the subject line says.
The four things usually left out
Customs examination charges. If the authority pulls your container for a scan or a physical inspection, that cost is normally passed through. It is unpredictable by design, so few forwarders price it in.
Demurrage caused at your end. Free time is on the booking. If your consignee cannot receive on the agreed day, the clock runs and the charge is yours.
Product compliance. DDP covers the shipping and the tax. It does not make your goods legal to sell. CE marking, FCC certification, local labelling, an importer of record where the destination requires a resident entity — those are commercial obligations, not freight ones.
Anti-dumping duty. Applied to specific goods from specific origins and often several times the normal rate. A quote built on the standard tariff heading will not contain it. If your product sits anywhere near a category with trade measures, confirm this explicitly.
When DDP is the right call
It suits you if you have no import entity in the destination, if you would rather have one number than five, or if the shipment is small enough that setting up a customs relationship is not worth it. Our duty-paid lanes are quoted this way end to end — China to Germany door to door, China to Lagos sea, duty paid, China to Adelaide with tax.
When it is not
If you import regularly, DDP is usually more expensive than handling clearance yourself, because someone is carrying your duty exposure and pricing that risk. Established importers with their own broker and deferment account almost always do better on FOB or CIF.
It is also a poor fit where you need the customs entry in your own name — to reclaim import VAT, to build entry history, or because the destination requires the importer of record to hold a particular licence.
Comparing the two
The country pages show duty-paid and freight-only channels on the same lane so the gap is visible rather than theoretical: China to Germany, China to Nigeria, China to South Africa. Each lane page also sets out which authority assesses the duty at destination and where to verify the current rate yourself.
