DDP without Shopify Plus

The assumption that delivered duty paid requires an enterprise plan keeps a lot of small brands shipping duties unpaid long past the point where it makes sense. It is not true, though the alternatives are worth understanding properly.

What is actually gated by plan

Shopify’s native managed duties and import taxes, and Markets Pro-style managed-merchant-of-record arrangements, are tied to higher tiers and in some cases to percentage-of-revenue pricing.

What is not gated is the underlying ability to calculate a landed cost, collect it at checkout as a line item, and create a label that enters the shipment duties paid. Those are three ordinary operations.

How it works on a Basic plan

At checkout, the HS code, country of origin, destination and order value produce a duty and tax estimate, plus the carrier’s brokerage component. That total is presented as a single import-charges line.

The customer pays it with the order. The shipment is then created with terms indicating duties are paid by the shipper, so the carrier bills your account instead of collecting from the recipient.

Variance between quote and invoice lands with you and gets reconciled monthly — which is correct, because the whole point is that the customer is done paying.

What you trade away

A managed merchant-of-record service takes on compliance responsibility and, in exchange, takes a percentage of your revenue. At scale that can be worth it.

Doing landed cost yourself on a lower plan keeps the cost flat and small, and keeps you responsible for your own classification accuracy. For a brand doing a few thousand dollars a month in US sales, a flat fee beats a percentage by a wide margin.

The honest comparison

If your US volume is large and your catalogue is complex, look seriously at a managed service and pay the percentage.

If your US volume is modest, the percentage is the expensive option and duties unpaid is the expensive-in-disguise option. A flat-fee landed-cost layer on your existing plan is the one that fits.

That is the segment DoorFree is built for: small Canadian brands who need their US customers to stop getting billed at the door, without being told to upgrade first.