How to Quote Product Plus Shipping Without Hiding the Assumptions

What lands on your desk is a net cost, not a client price

When you quote fulfilment to a client, you are re-quoting something. RyanFulfil quotes its net cost for one product, on one route, under a stated set of assumptions. You add your commission and issue the number to the client under your own name. The margin is the easy part. The part that loses accounts is what happens to the assumptions between the two quotes: they get dropped, and your client hears a firm price for a job that was only ever priced under conditions.

A quote is not a price with a currency symbol in front of it. It is a price plus the conditions under which it holds. Strip the conditions and you have not simplified the quote — you have turned an estimate into a promise you cannot keep, with your name on it.

Who prices, who invoices and whose brand is on the front are set out on the Agency Desk page. This guide is about the number itself.

The seven things one honest quote line carries

Read any fulfilment quote — the one you receive and the one you send — against seven fields. If a field is missing, it is an open question, not a rounding detail.

• One customer-ready unit — piece, pair, set or bundle, defined before any number.
• Product cost — the goods at the factory gate, inspected and packed.
• Packed shipping — the international lane, priced from real weight and dimensions.
• Route and destination — one lane to one country, on a named service (standard or fast).
• Preparation assumption — how long before the parcel physically starts moving.
• Delivery range — the working transit window for that route, given as a range.
• Exclusions — what is not inside the figure, and what would invalidate it.

The mechanics of each field are worked through for a direct seller in how to read a landed-price quote from a China fulfilment agent. Your job as the agency is to keep every one of those fields intact when you re-quote your commission on top of it.

One customer-ready unit, defined before the number

Write what one unit means before anything else: one piece, one pair, one set, one bundle, or one lot at a minimum order quantity. A bundle that ships as a single parcel is one line with one shipping charge, not three singles stacked together. A quote for the main unit of a multi-part kit is not a quote for the photograph of the full kit with its accessories and retail box. Get this wrong and your client builds their selling price on a unit you cannot actually fulfil at that number, and the gap surfaces on the first live order.

Packed shipping is a weight-and-dimension figure, not a round number

The shipping half of a landed price is a function of packed weight, packed dimensions, destination and quantity. Bulky, light goods price on volumetric weight, where shipping can be a multiple of the product cost. Without a weighed, boxed unit there is only a band. If your client needs a figure before stock exists, quote from a stated weight band and mark it provisional in writing, then re-confirm once the warehouse has the unit. A figure labelled provisional protects you; passed on as final, it does not, and you absorb the difference.

Route and destination change both the price and the promise

A landed price is a price to one country on one lane. A neighbouring country is a different line. The standard and fast lanes are different lines again. Most routes out of the Guangzhou warehouse ship DDP, so duties and tax sit inside the figure rather than ambushing your client's customer at the door. Two destination facts change the quote and belong in it:

• EU orders under €150 clear on IOSS, and a small per-order customs line appears on EU quotes — define it once, in the quote that introduces it, so it never reads as a surprise later.
• Some countries need a customer identifier before a parcel can clear customs: Turkey (TC Kimlik No), Chile (RUT), Brazil (CPF or CNPJ), South Korea (PCCC) and Argentina (CUIL). If your client sells there, that field is part of the order, not an afterthought.

Currency matters too. Quotes in USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, AUD, NZD and SGD carry no FX surcharge; TRY and HUF carry a small one. Say which currency the quote is in — a client comparing your number against a competitor's in another currency is not comparing like with like.

The preparation assumption is the line most quotes quietly drop

A transit window means nothing if the goods have not started moving. Production or procurement comes first, then factory to warehouse, then the lane. A custom or made-to-order item may need days of production a transit figure never mentioned. State the whole sequence, and say whose claim each part is: a factory's promised finish date is the factory's claim until the goods are scanned into the warehouse. Passing a supplier's "ready in three days" to your client as your own commitment is how a quote turns into a complaint — and the complaint arrives with your name on it, not the factory's.

Delivery range is an estimate — and you must say so in those words

The transit figure is a route-specific estimate from a maintained destination table, kept separate from processing time. It is not a promise about a specific parcel. Your client will want to turn it into a guaranteed delivery date for their checkout, and the quote must not help them do it.

Route-specific estimates, never guarantees. A partner who tells a client "guaranteed delivery by" a date is making a claim RyanFulfil cannot support and the approved-claims rules prohibit. Give the range, name the route, separate it from preparation time, and let your client set their own checkout language against it. Route transit ranges are published on shipping times so you can sanity-check any figure before you pass it on.

Exclusions, and what invalidates a quote

An honest quote says what it does not cover and what would void it. A quote is invalidated — and must be re-issued, not stretched — when any of these change:

• the variant changes (size, colour, fabric, model, page count);
• the destination or the lane changes;
• the order quantity or shape changes — a hundred units to one address is a freight quote, not a stack of parcel quotes;
• the packed weight or dimensions come back different from the band you quoted;
• the factory returns a similar item instead of the exact one — a similar item is a different product until the quote names what differs;
• the quote has simply aged past its stated validity.

Each of these is a new line, not a discount or a favour. Re-quoting a changed order is not backpedalling; issuing the old number against a changed order is the mistake.

Why a flat price with no product and no destination is not an answer

The question that sounds reasonable and has no operating answer is "what does it cost to ship an order?" There is no honest number without a product and a country, because the two inputs that move the figure most — packed volumetric weight and the destination lane — are precisely the two the question leaves out. A single universal per-order price is a marketing number, not a quote. Publish one and one of two things happens: you lose money on the bulky, far-away orders, or you overprice the light, near ones and your client works out they can buy the same public product direct. If a client pushes for a single figure, give a worked example for a real product to a real country and label it clearly as an example, not a tariff.

Adding your commission without hiding the estimate underneath

Where your commission sits depends on your path. On the referral path RyanFulfil contracts, invoices and prices the seller; you name your commission and it is added into the quote RyanFulfil issues, disclosed there as a partner fee. On co-manage and white label you receive RyanFulfil's net cost and set the client price yourself — your commission, retainer or project fees go on top and your client sees one number from you. Guidance is around 2%, the level that keeps a client's landed cost competitive against buying the same public product direct from AliExpress; you can charge more where the relationship supports it. How the net cost is built up is on pricing, and the full money flow is under the commercial model.

Whichever path you are on, one rule does not bend: your margin sits on top of the estimate, it does not convert the estimate into a guarantee. Adding 2% to a provisional shipping band does not make the band final. The commission is your reward for managing the relationship well, not a licence to round the assumptions off the quote.

A ten-second re-quote check before you send

Run every quote you are about to issue past this before your client sees it.

• Unit: is the price for one customer-ready unit I can actually order in?
• Product and packed shipping: both present, with shipping from a weighed unit or a clearly marked provisional band?
• Route and destination: one country, one named lane, DDP stated, and any customs or customer-ID field flagged?
• Preparation: production time separated from transit, with whose claim each date is made clear?
• Delivery: a range labelled as an estimate, never a guaranteed date?
• Exclusions and margin: what voids the quote is listed, and my commission is clearly on top rather than folded into a promise?

If every line survives that check, you can put your name on the number and defend it when your client asks. If one line does not, it is a question to close before the quote leaves your desk, not after. When you are ready to quote real products this way, apply to the Agency Desk and RyanFulfil will quote its net cost so you can build yours honestly on top of it.