Customs brokerage is a volume business. Once a broker has set up your account, learned your products and built your classifications, each additional entry costs them much less to process than the first one did. That should show up in your price. Often it doesn't.
Why the tenth entry is cheaper than the first
The expensive work in brokerage happens up front: setting up your importer profile, collecting product descriptions, classifying each item, confirming valuation and origin, and working out any other government agency requirements. Once that's done, a repeat shipment of the same products is mostly data entry and a check that nothing has changed.
So a broker's real cost per entry drops sharply as your volume grows and your product mix stabilizes. Brokers know this, which is why large importers negotiate tiered or flat monthly pricing that small importers never see.
The rate that never got updated
The most common problem we see isn't a bad initial quote. It's a fair quote that aged badly. A business signs up with a broker when it's importing two or three shipments a month, gets a standard rate card, and grows to 30 or 40 shipments a month without anyone revisiting the price.
The broker has no reason to raise it. You're now one of their better accounts, paying small-account prices.
What volume should get you
Depending on your lane and product mix, growing volume is usually a fair reason to ask for:
- A lower per-entry fee, or tiers that drop as your monthly count rises
- A cap on the disbursement fee, or a flat fee in its place
- Waived or reduced charges for extra invoice lines on repeat products
- Pre-arrival processing (PARS or PAPS) included rather than itemized
- An annual bond or security arrangement instead of per-entry charges
Volume isn't only about count
Two importers with the same number of entries can deserve very different rates. What matters to a broker's workload is how repeatable your shipments are. Thirty entries a month of the same ten products from the same supplier is easy work. Thirty entries of new products from new suppliers, each needing classification from scratch, is not.
If your shipments are repeatable, say so when you negotiate. It's a stronger argument than the count alone.
A simple check
Compare your average all-in cost per entry today with what it was when you started with your broker. If your volume has doubled or tripled and that number hasn't moved, it's time for a conversation.
We benchmark your fees against importers with a similar volume on the same lanes, so you can walk into that conversation with a number instead of a feeling.