Ehsan Amiri

From my personal experience, to cooose the right customs broker or forwarding agent, you ahould answer the following questions:

1. Do I have a specialized product line or type of import? If the answer is yes, you may wish to find a broker who either specializes or has a great deal of expertise in clearing your type of products. For example, textiles, apparel and alcoholic beverages have numerous laws and regulations that apply to their importation. Not every broker is experienced in handling these products, and choosing the wrong broker could cause you trouble.

2. How many ports will I be using for imports? If you are importing through several ports, you should hire a broker with their own offices in those ports. Your local one-office broker may give you great service in their home port, but they will have to use sub-agents in other ports and thus will lose a great deal of control. By the same token, if you are only importing through one port, the smaller, one-port broker may be perfect for you since they can often give you much more personalized, hands-on service.

3. Is automation easy with this partner? Any freight forwarder or broker—regardless of size—must be fully automated with full connectivity to the tools necessary to partner with your company.

4. What is the broker or freight forwarder’s general reputation? Don’t automatically believe what the brokers or freight forwarders’ marketing materials say about their capabilities and reputation. Your best source of information is from their own customers. Ask for references. You can also get a relatively non-biased opinion from local ocean and air carriers.

5. Do I need a dedicated account representative? If your volume of imports is large enough, you should have a key operational contact at your broker or forwarder who will coordinate all aspects of your account. In the least, you should have personal contact with someone who can help you answer your questions and who knows the basics about your company.

Export controls are those processes and procedures within a company that ensures US Government export requirements can be met. Those controls include how items are classified, how access is controlled, how authorization for export is obtained, and how the items can be controlled throughout the business cycle within the company.

Yes, there is a time limit to recover duty. There are 2 ways to recover duty: A Post Summary Correction (PSC) and a Protest. A PSC can be filed once the entry has been filed up until 300 days from the date of the entry or 15 days prior to the liquidation date. The Protest can be filed after an entry has been liquidated and up to 180 days after the entry has liquidated.

I have been in the trade industry for more than 10 years and I have been doing both Electronic Commerce and Traditional Commerce. Of course, there are plenty of advantages for choosing Electronic Commerce. I would like to mention 4 of them:

1. Opportunity to gain new customers with Search Engine Visibility Traditional retail is determined by branding and relationships. In addition to these two, online retail is also driven by traffic from search engines.
2. Chance to locate the product quicker On e-commerce websites, customers can easily click through intuitive navigation or use a search box to narrow down their product search immediately. Some websites remember customer preferences and shopping lists to facilitate repeat purchase.
3. Being open all the time Another major factor why the customer would prefer e-commerce websites to traditional commerce is that they can shop at any time as e-commerce store timings are 24*7*365.
4. Creating markets for niche products

In a traditional commerce environment, buyers and sellers of niche products can find it difficult to locate each other. On the other side, in the online world, all you have to do as a buyer is to type the specific product in a search engine and you will find a list of websites that sell the product.

Except for a few goods under HS chapter 89 ‘Ships, boats and floating structures’ and the product code 2716 00 00 ‘Electrical energy’, quantity is expressed in kilograms. It reflects the net mass, i.e. the weight of the goods without any packaging.

For certain goods, a supplementary quantity is provided in addition to the net mass. This quantity is expressed in a unit which provides useful information. Supplementary units are units other than kilograms such as, for example, litres, numbers of pieces, carats, terajoules or square metres. For each CN8 code, the Combined Nomenclature indicates whether a supplementary quantity should be provided and, if so, in which supplementary unit.