How Much Does It Cost to Import from China to Nigeria? A Line by Line Breakdown

A 1688 listing says 38 yuan. Somebody converts that in their head, gets a number under ten thousand naira, and decides they have found a business. Three weeks later the actual cost is closer to twenty five thousand and nobody can explain where the difference came from.

The difference is not hidden. It is just spread across five lines that nobody counted. Here they are, in order, with a worked example running through all of them.

Line 1: the goods

The price of the item itself, on the row that matches your variant and your quantity.

Chinese wholesale listings quote in tiers. Buy two and you pay one price. Buy fifty and you pay another. The big number at the top of a 1688 page is normally the fifty-plus tier on the cheapest colourway, which is not what you are buying.

Find the price table. Find your row. That number is line one. If the table is confusing, this walks through it.

Worked example. A crossbody bag, listed with a header price of 26 yuan. The row for two pieces in the colour we want is 45 yuan each. Two pieces: 90 yuan.

Note what just happened. The advertised number was 26 and the real number is 45, before anything has moved.

Line 2: China domestic freight

1688 sellers ship to Chinese addresses. Getting your goods from the supplier to a consolidation warehouse is a separate cost, usually small but not zero, and it scales badly on small orders.

Sellers often advertise free domestic shipping. That is normally conditional on a spend threshold or a quantity you have not reached. Below the threshold you pay it.

Worked example. Two pieces does not hit the seller’s free-shipping threshold, so domestic freight is 12 yuan.

Running total: 102 yuan of China-side cost, on goods that were advertised at 26 each.

Line 3: international freight

The line that is not on the product page at all, and the one that varies most.

Air freight is charged on whichever is greater between actual weight and volumetric weight, so a dense parcel and a bulky one of the same mass cost very different amounts. Two structured bags might weigh 1.6 kg on the scale but occupy enough space to be charged as three or four. The volumetric formula is worth knowing.

Freight is also seasonal. The same shipment in March and in November are not the same price, because capacity in the last quarter is tight worldwide. This is predictable and worth planning for.

This is why nobody serious publishes a fixed per-kilo rate. Anyone who does is quoting a number that was true once.

Line 4: duty and charges

Nigerian import duty is calculated on the CIF value, meaning cost of goods plus insurance plus freight. Not on the goods alone. That trips people up, because it means expensive freight also increases your duty.

The duty rate itself depends on how the goods are classified under the HS code system, and rates differ substantially between categories. On top of the duty there are further charges: a surcharge, a levy, and VAT calculated on the running total.

Two honest caveats. First, the exact percentages change, so any article quoting fixed figures should be checked against current Nigeria Customs Service guidance rather than trusted. Second, small consignments may qualify for the 300 dollar de minimis threshold introduced in September 2025, which is capped at four importations a year and carries conditions. It is relief with rules rather than a guarantee.

The mechanics in full are here.

Line 5: currency

The line that behaves least like a line, because it is not a fee. It is exposure.

Your goods are priced in yuan. International freight is usually quoted in dollars. You pay in naira. Between the moment you commit and the moment the goods land, all three relationships can move.

Three things follow from that.

• The rate you saw quoted online is not the rate a business actually settles at. Official rates, card rates and the rate for moving real money are different numbers.
• A quote given today is a quote for today. If you sit on it for two weeks, it may need refreshing, and that is not a trick.
• If you are reselling, pricing your goods off the yuan cost rather than the naira you actually paid will quietly destroy your margin during any FX move. Price off what you paid.

A locked naira price is somebody else absorbing that exposure for the duration of your order. It is not free, and it is not a scam. It is a service with a cost attached, and the cost is usually smaller than the swing it protects you from.

Line 6: last mile

Getting the parcel from the Lagos hub to your address. Small for Lagos, larger for the North, and occasionally doubled when a delivery fails and has to be reattempted.

People building spreadsheets almost always forget this line, and then wonder why the margin was thinner than modelled. If you are outside Lagos, it is not a rounding error.

Putting the example together

Deliberately, there is no bottom line in naira on that table. Publishing one would be inventing a number that stops being true within weeks, and you would screenshot it.

What is durable is the shape. Two bags advertised at 26 yuan each are not a 52 yuan purchase. They are a 102 yuan purchase before anything leaves China, and by the time they reach a door in Nigeria the landed cost typically sits somewhere between two and three times the converted China-side figure.

That multiplier is a sanity check, not a formula. Dense high-value goods land closer to two. Light bulky cheap goods can exceed three comfortably.

How to use this before you order

1. Write down the real goods price from the table row, not the header.
2. Add China domestic if you have not hit the seller’s threshold.
3. Estimate the parcel volume, not just the weight. If the product is fluffy, expect freight to hurt.
4. Assume duty applies. If it turns out not to, that is upside, not a plan.
5. Add a currency buffer across your lead time rather than pricing at today’s rate.
6. Add last mile to your actual address.
7. Compare the result to the local price, not to the yuan price. That is the only comparison that means anything.

Step seven is the one that saves the most money. Plenty of products are cheaper in Lagos once everything is counted, and finding that out before you pay is a win, not a defeat. Sometimes the market wins.

Why a catalog price can look expensive and still be honest

Somebody compares a naira price on a store to a yuan screenshot and concludes the store is marking up hard. The comparison is not like for like.

The store price has already absorbed all six lines. It has also absorbed the work of placing the order, catching the substitution when the supplier swaps a colour, checking the goods, consolidating, clearing, and delivering. And it has taken the currency exposure off you.

The right comparison is naira quote against naira quote, or against what the same item costs delivered from any other route. Not against a number on a Chinese wholesale page that nobody in Nigeria can actually pay. How a naira price gets built is here.

Building your own landed cost sheet

The single most useful thing a small importer can build, and it fits on one screen.

One row per order, with these columns:

Two columns do the heavy lifting. Quantity sellable, because dividing by what you ordered rather than what arrived usable overstates your margin on every batch. And units sold by when, because that is your sell-through rate, which is what sets your reorder point. Calculating it.

Ten minutes per order. After four or five orders you stop estimating landed cost and start knowing it, which is the point at which the guessing ends.

Two products, same money, different outcome

A comparison that shows why the multiplier varies so much, using shapes rather than invented naira figures.

Product A: a stainless steel bracelet. Cheap to buy, tiny, dense, ships for almost nothing. Duty applies to a small CIF value. Last mile is the same as anything else. The goods are the largest share of the landed cost, and the multiple on the yuan price is low.

Product B: a padded jacket. Similar goods cost. Very bulky, so freight is charged on volume and is several times the goods cost. That higher freight also raises the assessable value for duty. The goods are the smallest share of the landed cost, and the multiple is high.

Same money leaving your account. Completely different landed cost, and it was predictable from the carton dimensions on the listing. Running the volume calculation before ordering.

The lesson for choosing products: value density is not a nice-to-have, it is the largest single lever on your landed cost.

The lines people forget, ranked by how much they cost

1. Currency movement across the lead time. Invisible until settlement, and the largest omission in most spreadsheets.
2. Volumetric weight rather than actual weight. Routinely doubles a freight estimate on light bulky goods.
3. Duty, assumed away. Budgeting for zero and receiving a charge removes the margin on that batch.
4. Delivery to your customer. Free delivery is not free, it is a cost you absorbed.
5. Damaged and unsellable units. Dividing by units ordered rather than units sellable.
6. China domestic freight. Small, and it exists.
7. Packaging for resale. Bags, tissue, tape, inserts.
8. Payment processing fees. A percentage on every sale.
9. Returns provision. Not every unit sells cleanly.

The first two together account for most of the gap between a modelled margin and a real one. Building a price on top of the real figure.

When landed cost tells you not to buy

The most valuable use of the calculation, and the least used.

Run the six lines before ordering, compare the result to what the item sells for locally, and accept the answer.

Three situations where the honest answer is do not import:

The local price is close to your landed cost. The market is winning, usually because somebody imported at container scale. Where local genuinely competes.

Freight is more than the goods. Possible on bulky low-value items, and it almost never recovers at retail.

The margin depends on duty not applying. That is a bet rather than a business, because the 300 dollar threshold is capped and conditional rather than something every order can rely on. Why.

Finding this out before you pay is a win. Finding it out after the goods land is tuition.

Questions people ask

How much does it cost to import from China to Nigeria?

For small fashion and accessory orders, expect total landed cost to run between two and three times the converted yuan price. The six components are goods, China domestic freight, international freight, duty and charges, currency movement, and last-mile delivery.

What is landed cost?

The total cost of getting a product from a supplier to your door, including every fee along the way. It is the only number worth pricing a resale against, because it is the only number that reflects what you actually spent.

Is duty calculated on the product price?

No. Nigerian import duty is assessed on the CIF value, which is the cost of the goods plus insurance plus freight. Higher freight therefore increases the duty as well.

Why can’t anyone give me a fixed shipping rate?

Because air freight pricing moves with fuel, capacity and season, and because the charge depends on your parcel’s volume as well as its weight. A published rate card is accurate on the day it is written and drifts from there.

Should I price my products in yuan or naira?

Naira, based on what you actually paid. Pricing off the yuan cost means a currency move during your three week lead time comes straight out of your margin.

Does a bigger order reduce the cost per unit?

Usually yes, on two lines. The goods price steps down at quantity tiers, and freight per unit falls as a shipment gets denser. It does not reduce duty rates or currency exposure.

The short version

Six lines, not one. The yuan sticker is the smallest of them on cheap goods and the largest on expensive ones, which is exactly why the multiplier varies so much. Count all six before you order, compare the result to the local price rather than the Chinese one, and price your resale off what you actually paid.