Import duties, customer service and other fees | Profit Bidding Guide | GROW
Profit Bidding – The Complete Guide

Section 2 · Cost tracking

Import duties, customer service and other fees

Lesson 8 of 26 · 1 min read

Import duties

Some products you import have additional fees to pay for import. If these are not fully accounted for in the selling price, you should track these too.

Customer service fees

Work out how many support requests each customer service handler can process per hour, and track this against their wages. This is usually very similar to handling fees, where we expect a staff member to process a request every 5 minutes, with 70% efficiency over the hour. On a wage of £12 per hour, this is approximately £1.50 per request.

Not every order needs a support request. If only 1 in 5 orders does, divide the fee by 5, so around 30p per order.

Other fees

This is more of a catch-all cost that allows you to put fixed costs against each sale, to account for things like advertising agency fees, operational fees or similar.

It is usually advisable to check what your running costs are, the salaries of your staff for example, and divide this by the number of orders you generate.

This may be somewhat challenging to calculate, especially for bricks and mortar stores, so you may want to look at what percentage of your orders are pure web orders, and apply this percentage to your workforce cost. E.g. if your workforce cost is £50k per month and your web orders are 20%, £10k can be attributed to web orders. If you do 3,500 web orders per month, this is £2.86 in other fees per order.

Example

Workforce cost per month£50,000
Share of orders from web20%
Workforce cost for web orders£10,000
Web orders per month3,500
Other fees per order£2.86