Most importers work out whether a deal is good by looking at the supplier's price. That is the smallest part of what they will actually pay. By the time the goods reach a warehouse in Nigeria, the real cost per item can be half as much again, and traders discover this only after the money has gone.
This tool answers the question that decides the deal: what does one unit cost me by the time I can sell it, and can I still make money at my price? Type what the item is and it fills in the tax rates from Nigeria's own tariff. Nothing you type leaves your device.
Step 1: what are you importing?
Every product in world trade has an HS code and that code decides your tax rate. Type the item in your own words (fridge, rice, solar panel, generator), or type the code if you have it.
Loading the tariff table…
Importing into another country? Skip this step and type the duty rate yourself in Step 2. Everything else on this page works anywhere.
Step 2: the deal
Tap the ? beside any field for a plain-English explanation.
Your tax rates
Step 3: getting it out of the port
These are the costs nobody puts in the spreadsheet, and together they are often bigger than the freight. Enter them in naira. If you do not know a figure yet, ask your clearing agent for a written estimate before you pay your supplier, not after.
Step 4: what a delay would do to it
This is the cost that turns a good deal into a bad one, and almost nobody prices it in. Pick where the box is landing and how late you might be, and the tool uses that operator's published rates. Leave the days at 0 if you would rather not model it.
Step 5: your money, and your price
Step 6: what it really costs
This is an estimate, not a quotation. Customs can classify your goods under a different code or value them above your invoice, tariffs and levies change with policy, and local charges vary by port, by container and by agent. Use this to decide whether a deal is worth pursuing, then get written figures before you commit money.
Tap a heading to read it.
Why the supplier's price tells you almost nothing
A trader is offered light fittings at 12 dollars each and works out a selling price from that. It feels like the important number because it is the one being negotiated. It is not.
By the time that item is standing in a warehouse in Lagos it has collected freight, insurance, import duty, a customs service levy, a port surcharge, a regional trade levy, VAT charged on top of all of those, terminal and shipping line charges, an agent's fee, and a truck. On an ordinary consignment those additions commonly come to somewhere between a third and two thirds of what was paid to the supplier, and on a high-duty product they can exceed it.
Which means two importers can buy identical goods at an identical price and one makes money while the other does not. The difference is never the negotiation. It is everything that happens after.
The number to argue about
If you take one habit from this page, make it this: stop comparing supplier prices and start comparing landed cost per unit. A supplier who is 8% more expensive but ships from a country with a lower duty rate, in a container that fits more, can be the cheaper deal by a wide margin. You cannot see that from a price list.
The three that catch people out
VAT is charged on the taxes, not just the goods. Nigeria's VAT is applied to the value of your goods plus the freight plus the insurance plus the duty plus the surcharge plus every levy. Tax on top of tax. It is the single biggest reason the final bill is larger than people expect, and it is why a high duty rate hurts twice.
The delay is a cost, not an accident. Storage and demurrage are not rare misfortunes, they are a normal outcome of a document arriving late. Ten days is common. Put ten days into Step 4 and watch what it does to your cost per unit. If your margin cannot survive it, your margin was never real.
Money has a price even when it is yours. Most importers pay the supplier months before the customer pays them. If that money is borrowed, the interest is a cost of the shipment as surely as the freight is. If it is your own, it is money that could have been doing something else. Ignoring it is how a business grows its turnover and shrinks its bank balance at the same time.
What to do with the answer
Work out the landed cost before you pay the supplier, not after the goods arrive. At that point you can still change the order size, choose a different supplier, ship differently, or walk away. Once the money has gone, the arithmetic on this page stops being a decision and becomes a post mortem.
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