The answer lives in the programme terms, the logistics agreement, and the entry paperwork, in that order of reliability. Marketing pages describe seamlessness. The terms describe liability. Look for who is named as importer on the entry, whose bond the entry rides on, who receives the duty bills and the post entry notices, and whose account a refund or drawback would land in. If your broker has never seen the channel's entries, there is a fair chance they are not yours. If CBP correspondence about the channel arrives at your office, they are.
Ask the question in writing when the documents are ambiguous, and keep the answer in the channel file. Staff turnover at platforms is a constant, and the person who explained the model at onboarding will not be reachable in year three when an assessment arrives addressed to whoever the record says it should be.
Blending channels into one landed cost is the quiet error this creates. The managed channel's true cost is the platform's cross border fee and the margin given up inside its calculation, visible only if you compare the duty inclusive price the customer paid against the settlement you received. The seller shipped channel's cost is the classical stack, product, freight, duty at your classification, brokerage, and the compliance overhead of being the importer. Averaging the two produces a number that describes neither and misprices both.
Watch for the double count and its opposite. A seller who adds a duty line on top of a managed channel's settlement is charging themselves twice and will price out of the channel. A seller who assumes the platform handled duty on a seller shipped order is building an unrecorded liability, accruing interest in the dark, and calling it margin.
Where you are the importer, the obligations follow you personally as a business: reasonable care in classification and valuation, records retained for the statutory period, responses to CBP inquiries within their deadlines, and liability for underpayments discovered years later. That is a workload with a cost, whether it sits with a broker, a trade compliance hire, or a founder's evenings, and the channel's landed cost should carry a fair share of it rather than pretending compliance is free because no invoice itemises it.
Programmes change terms. Platforms restructure cross border offerings, shift the importer role, or exit markets, and each change rewrites the channel's cost structure and possibly its liability tail for past entries. Assign someone to read programme notices with the importer question in mind. The notice that changes who is importer rarely headlines itself that way.
Importer allocation also decides what the buyer sees: a clean delivered price with nothing to pay at the door, a duty estimate collected at checkout, or a courier demand on delivery. When you evaluate a channel's conversion, read it against the doorstep experience its importer model creates. A channel that looks expensive on fees may be buying you the DDP experience your own shipping cannot match in that market, and a cheap channel may be charging its real price in refusals further down the funnel.
There is no universally right allocation. There is a right answer per channel, written down, modelled separately, and reviewed when the terms move. Do that and the marketplace stops being a mystery in the cost meeting and becomes what it should have been all along: a priced option with known edges.
Check the programme terms and the entry documents: whose name and bond are on the entry, who receives duty bills and CBP notices. If the trail is unclear, ask the platform in writing and file the answer.
No. The duty is inside the transaction economics, in the platform's fees or the price the customer paid and your settlement reflects. Your landed cost for that channel should use the settlement reality rather than adding a duty line.
Yes, if the documents name you as importer, your liability follows the record, not your assumption. That mismatch is exactly what the written check exists to catch early.
Wherever importer role, fees, or delivery terms differ between channels, yes. A blended figure misprices every channel it averages.