Atlanta-based UPS on Wednesday launched what it promises will be a game-changer for its international shipping customers: an upfront guaranteed calculation of import tax and duty costs.
Until now, the company estimates that tens of thousands of global residential deliveries arrive daily with duties and taxes still due on delivery, often as a surprise.
The new AI-driven service, “Global Checkout,” integrates nearly real-time tariff and trade policies of 43 origin countries and more than 200 destinations to guarantee the total upfront and avoid those surprise second bills.
The total is locked in at time of shipment, which means customers pay a set price even if tariffs go up or down before a shipment arrives. That also means UPS assumes the risk if the calculation is wrong and tariffs increase.
Kiel Harkness, VP of UPS’ Europe and Americas strategy, said the service, which comes at an additional cost to shipping customers, has been in the works since the fall.
But, he said, “I’m not going to argue that the timing is good for Global Checkout.”
Those doing business in and out of the U.S. have been bracing for various possible financial impacts from the Trump administration’s tariffs and trade policies.
But Harkness said tariff and trade uncertainty has been a long-standing problem for customers everywhere selling things via international online transactions.
“Nobody has really solved their uncertainty” and been able to get “duties and taxes and fees right when they sell cross border,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an interview.
“I heard that in Asia. I heard that in Europe. I heard that in the U.K. We hear it here today obviously in this domestic market.”
The problem has discouraged some customers from growing internationally, he said, since most think about expansion in terms of larger regions like Western Europe or Southeast Asia.
The multiple countries involved magnifies the complexity of duties and tax differences, he said.
But the AI-powered “Global Checkout,” he said, dynamically updates policy changes, international tax laws, duties and tariffs “almost in real time” in a way that it was never feasible to do manually.
He said their customers are watching to see how it improves “checkout cart abandonment” as well as how many more foreign markets it can open up for them.
Global Checkout is now available as a service embeddable into their own e-commerce websites’ checkout pages. In May, UPS will also offer it within its own in-house shipping software used by small businesses, WorldShip, Harkness said.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
