Advisory

If this ships to my country, who pays the customs duty and import tax?

ALS-COFFEE-1.3-DUTY-001

This question is worth asking but is not reducible to a check a page can settle. It is published as guidance, not as a test.

Assertion

import_duty_incidence is_stated true

Applicability

applies when
the seller offers international shipping
signal
international shipping offered in policy or checkout terms

Accepted evidence

  • shipping_policy — a statement of which party bears duty and import tax, scoped to the destinations it applies to

Explicitly insufficient evidence

What does not count, and why. Published because the omission is where a check quietly becomes a claim.

  • "we ship worldwide"
    No destination list and no duty statement, and frequently untrue at checkout.
  • "taxes and duties calculated at checkout"
    This describes a process rather than a term and does not say who ends up paying; it is the single most common way the question is dodged while appearing answered.
  • "free shipping over a threshold" where the threshold is domestic only
    A check extracting a zero shipping rate records free international shipping, which is the opposite of the term.
  • "prices exclude taxes"
    It states neither what will be added nor by whom.
  • a delivered-duty term with no country scope
    Such terms are typically offered on some lanes only, so an unscoped statement is not a term for the buyer's destination.
  • a destination list with no duty term
    It satisfies structured-data validation while leaving the buyer exposed to the surprise the question is about.

Conflict rules

  • When a duty statement predates a change in a destination's de minimis treatment — then treat the statement as suspect for that destination and record its scope rather than accepting it as current

Discrimination

Authored expectation: no prediction, confidence low. The numeric band this standard used to carry is not published at this grammar version.

Most sellers offering international shipping describe a process rather than stating who bears duty, so the assertion would fail for a large majority. Published as advisory because the checkout-time dodge is worth naming and because scoping the term by destination is beyond what a product page usually carries.

The numeric fail-rate band this reasoning was authored with is NOT carried at grammar 1.2 and is not reproduced here. Authored bands held 1 of 10 against this category's own sample and every miss was HIGH, so a direction derived from the band would inherit the error that condemned it (SCHEMA.md §9.3 step 3). The band survives in ALS-COFFEE v1.1 (standard_hash f8ec2780f60c38931913e5b6cd37506500c8462709209de7180ba6691d6137e7), which is byte-frozen and still served.

For a shopper

Duty and import tax on a coffee parcel can arrive as a demand at the door, and calculated at checkout does not tell you who pays. The term you want names the party and the destinations it covers.

For a merchant

State who bears duty and import tax, scoped to the destinations the term covers, in the shipping policy rather than deferring the answer to checkout.

Grounding

  • Baymard Institute checkout usability research (academic)
    that unexpected costs added at or after checkout are among the leading measured causes of cart abandonment, which is the documented consequence of leaving duty incidence unstated