Your margin lives in the landed cost. Most brands only see it after the invoice.
Tide prices duty, freight, and fees to the SKU before the PO is cut, and books the capacity that keeps inventory off the stockout clock through the one season that decides the year.
The pains that are specific to moving product for a DTC brand.
Freight forwarders that mostly move industrial cargo will nod at these and then quote you a generic ocean rate. These are the ones that actually decide whether Q4 goes well.
The golden-week squeeze
Every brand wants space booked for October and November, and every factory in China shuts down for a week in early October at the same time. Book late against that calendar and you are not competing for a rate, you are competing for an allocation that may not exist. The booking has to go in against the factory's production schedule, not against your own sense of when peak starts.
Landed cost per SKU
A unit's true cost is freight, duty, brokerage, and fees stacked on top of the factory price, and most of that stack is invisible until weeks after the PO. If a SKU's landed cost erodes contribution margin below plan, you find out on the P&L, not on the quote. Tide puts that number on the record before the container is booked.
De minimis is not a strategy
The low-value import exemption that a lot of DTC supply chains were quietly built around has been narrowing, and the ground under China-origin de minimis in particular has already shifted once this decade. Rules in this area move; a program that treats a threshold as permanent is a program one notice away from a duty bill it did not model.
The stockout window
There is a gap between a vessel that rolls or slips its ETA and a warehouse that runs out of a bestselling SKU, and that gap is where lost sales actually happen. Replenishment timing is a freight problem wearing an inventory-planning costume: the fix is booking against the reorder point, not against a calendar that assumes every sailing arrives on schedule.
Booked against the reorder point, not the calendar.
Four pieces of a DTC program, each one built around the fact that inventory has a clock running on it.
Replenishment-aligned booking
Base-load volume moves ocean on a standing schedule tied to your reorder points. When a SKU is closing in on a stockout faster than the next sailing arrives, Tide prices the air gap-fill alongside it so you are comparing the freight premium against the actual cost of an empty shelf, not guessing.
- Ocean base-load on a standing cadence
- Air gap-fill priced against stockout risk
- Reorder-point triggers, not a fixed calendar
Per-SKU landed cost
HS classification and duty exposure sit on the record before the PO is cut, so the contribution margin you plan to is the contribution margin you actually get.
- HS classification at SKU scale
- Duty on the record pre-PO
Peak-season program
Space for October and November gets locked against the factory production and golden-week shutdown calendar, not booked cold in September when everyone else is calling the same carriers.
- Capacity locked ahead of Q4
- Golden-week production calendar factored in
Fulfillment handoff
Delivery does not stop at the port. Tide coordinates final-mile into your 3PL or fulfillment center with dock appointments on the record, so the container that clears customs on time does not sit in a drayage queue while the appointment window closes.
- Dock appointments on the shipment record
- 3PL and FC delivery coordination
- Drayage timed against the appointment window
Three ways this looks depending on where you sit.
Same freight program, different vantage points on the same replenishment clock.
Checks landed cost by pulling last quarter's invoices and hoping duty didn't move on the SKUs that mattered.
Sees landed cost per SKU on the quote, before the PO goes out, on every reorder.
Runs contribution margin as a live number instead of a quarterly surprise.
Books Q4 ocean space in September against a calendar that assumes every sailing lands on time.
Has peak-season capacity locked against the golden-week production schedule months earlier.
Runs peak with the same booking discipline as a normal month, because the program already absorbed the seasonality.
Watches a bestselling SKU's days-of-cover drop while a delayed vessel is still three ports away.
Gets an air gap-fill priced and ready before the reorder point actually breaches.
Sets reorder points that assume the freight program will flag the gap, not the other way around.
Inventory that arrives when the forecast said it would is a freight decision, made weeks earlier.
dock / shelfWhat e-commerce importing actually touches.
DTC freight runs through more regulatory surface than the volume suggests. Every SKU needs an HTSUS classification that holds up at scale, not a best-guess applied once and reused. The de minimis and Section 321 landscape for low-value shipments has already narrowed once for China-origin goods and keeps moving, so a program built on today's threshold needs to be able to move with it, not break when it changes. Marketplace-collected tax obligations interact with your own customs entries in ways that are easy to double-count or miss. And forced-labor screening under UFLPA is no longer a niche compliance line for anyone sourcing apparel, electronics, or cotton-adjacent goods from flagged regions, it is a category-level check every shipment should clear before it is booked.
- HTSUS classification
- Section 321 / de minimis (shifting)
- UFLPA screening
- Marketplace tax and customs interplay
- Duty drawback on returns
Price your next replenishment order.
Landed cost per SKU, peak-season capacity, and a delivery record that reaches the fulfillment center.