The maker's costing glossary
Landed Cost
The true cost of a material once it reaches your bench.
Landed cost is what a material actually costs you by the time you can use it: the purchase price plus shipping, duties, taxes, and handling. The sticker price alone understates it — sometimes badly, for imported supplies or small quantities where shipping is a large share of the order.
Why it matters
If you cost from the sticker price, every product that uses that material is underpriced by the shipping and duties you forgot. It's a silent leak: small per unit, large across a year. For makers importing specialty supplies, landed cost can be 20–40% above the item price.
How to calculate it
Add the item price plus its share of shipping, duties, and handling for the order, then divide by the quantity to get a true per-unit material cost.
Landed cost = item price + shipping + duties + handling
Example
A $40 leather hide with $12 shipping has a landed cost of $52 — 30% more than the price tag. Costing at $40 quietly underprices every wallet cut from it.
In practice
Makers who buy from overseas or in small batches feel this most. Recording landed cost once, when you receive a material, keeps every downstream product honest.
Common mistakes
- Entering the item price and ignoring shipping and duties.
- Spreading a big freight bill unevenly, so some products absorb none of it.
- Forgetting that small orders carry disproportionately high shipping per unit.
How CrafterBy handles it
Enter a material's real landed cost in CrafterBy and every product built from it prices correctly — no per-order freight math each time.