Most Australian importers still work out landed cost in a spreadsheet someone built three years ago, and most supplier emails get written from scratch at 11pm because the supplier in Shenzhen or Ho Chi Minh City is only awake for a few overlapping hours. Neither problem is really about arithmetic or grammar. It is about the time it takes a small importer to turn a supplier invoice into a number they can trust, and a question into an email that gets answered properly. Claude is useful here in a specific, unglamorous way: reading the paperwork, doing the working, and drafting the message, so the person running the business spends their attention on the supplier relationship and the pricing decision, not the formatting.
What actually goes into a landed cost
Landed cost is the true cost of a unit sitting in an Australian warehouse, not the price on the supplier's proforma invoice. Importers who only track the FOB price routinely under-price their stock, because everything between the factory gate and the warehouse door adds up. A single container of homewares or electronics can carry six or seven separate cost lines before it is sellable, and each one moves independently.
FOB or EXW purchase price from the supplier invoice, in the original currency
International freight and insurance from the port of loading to Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane
Customs duty, calculated against the correct tariff classification under the Australian Border Force schedule
GST payable on import, generally 10% of the customs value plus duty and freight
Quarantine and biosecurity inspection fees where the goods trigger an AQIS hold
Local cartage, customs broker fees and any warehousing before the stock reaches your own shelf
The foreign exchange movement between the date you agreed the price and the date you actually paid the supplier
That last line is the one most small importers underestimate. A three or four cent swing in the AUD/USD rate over a six week shipping window can shift the landed cost of a $120,000 order by several thousand dollars, and if that movement isn't captured in the sell price, the margin just evaporates quietly. Building this by hand in a spreadsheet works until someone is on leave, the tariff code changes, or a new product line needs its own version of the same formula.
Where Claude actually helps with the numbers
Claude can read a supplier's PDF invoice or packing list directly, pull out the FOB value, quantities and HS code references, and build the landed cost worksheet against the freight quote and the current exchange rate you give it. It won't lodge a customs declaration or replace a licensed customs broker, and it shouldn't be trusted to pick a tariff classification unsupervised, but it is genuinely good at doing the working once the classification and duty rate are confirmed, checking that a per-unit cost has been calculated consistently across a whole purchase order, and flagging when a new invoice looks like it doesn't match the agreed contract terms before someone pays it.
For a business bringing in four or five containers a month, that is the difference between a bookkeeper spending half a day reconciling landed cost against the general ledger and spending twenty minutes checking a draft that is already mostly right.
Where Claude helps with supplier communications
The other half of importing is the relationship, and most of that relationship happens over email with someone whose first language isn't English, on the other side of a ten to thirteen hour gap. Claude is useful for drafting the first version of that message so the importer isn't starting from a blank page at the end of a long day.
Purchase order confirmations that restate quantities, unit price, Incoterms and payment terms clearly enough that a misreading is unlikely on either side
Polite but firm follow-ups when a shipment date has slipped, with the original commitment quoted back so there is no ambiguity
Quality dispute emails that describe the defect precisely, reference the relevant clause in the purchase agreement, and propose a specific remedy such as a credit note or replacement stock
Payment term negotiation drafts, for example moving from 30% deposit and 70% before shipment to a letter of credit or open account arrangement as the relationship matures
Plain-English summaries of a supplier's reply for a business partner who wasn't on the thread, so nothing gets lost in translation twice
None of this replaces the judgment call about which supplier to trust or when to walk away from a deal. What it removes is the friction of writing every one of these emails from a cold start, and the risk that an important detail like an Incoterm or a payment milestone gets left out because the message was dashed off between other jobs.
A worked example from a Sydney importer
Take a Sydney-based homewares importer bringing in a container of ceramic tableware valued at $95,000 FOB from a supplier in Vietnam. Freight and insurance to Port Botany come to $8,500, customs duty applies at 5% of the customs value, and GST is payable at 10% on the customs value plus duty and freight. Quarantine inspection adds a further $650, and the customs broker charges a flat $420 per shipment.
FOB value: $95,000
Freight and insurance: $8,500
Customs duty at 5%: approximately $4,750
GST at 10% on customs value plus duty and freight: approximately $10,825
Quarantine inspection: $650
Broker and cartage: $420
Total landed cost: roughly $120,145 against an invoiced FOB price of $95,000
That is a landed cost roughly 26% above the FOB figure the supplier quoted, before a single unit has been sold. If the AUD weakens against the US dollar between order confirmation and payment, that gap widens further. Claude can hold this worksheet, update it the moment a new freight quote or FX rate comes in, and draft the internal note explaining to the rest of the business why the sell price on that range needs to move, in plain terms that don't require a finance background to follow.
Getting started without adding risk
The sensible way to bring this in is to keep a person checking the output, not to hand over sign-off. Have Claude draft the landed cost worksheet and the supplier email, then have the same person who currently does that job review it before anything goes out or gets paid. Supplier documents sometimes contain personal information about individual contacts, so treat that data the way the Privacy Act requires you to treat any other business record, and keep the tariff classification decision with a person or a licensed broker who is accountable for it.
If landed cost workings or supplier communications are eating a disproportionate share of your week, it's worth a short conversation about where Claude actually fits into your import process. Book a brainstorm and we'll work through your actual purchase orders, not a generic demo.
