International shipping & commercial invoice
Any order that is shipped from a Shipwire warehouse in a given country (e.g. UK), to a destination address in a different country requires additional paperwork (a commercial invoice) to clear customs. Learn more about the risks inherent in international shipping here.
Commercial Invoice
Shipwire will produce the required paperwork for all of your international orders, but does require certain information to be present. Orders that do not have sufficient information will automatically be placed on hold until the required information is supplied. Once present, these orders will automatically clear their holds, and be processed. However, you can avoid any unnecessary delays by ensuring that all of the required company and product-level information needed (by customs) is supplied before we receive your international orders.
Editing the Commercial Invoice in Shipwire
In certain situations, it may be necessary to override the SKU value that Shipwire uses to prepare your invoice (e.g. wholesale orders). When wholesale purchase orders are processed, the retail value of each item should reflect the price your wholesaler paid, and not the full retail value as expressed in your Shipwire product catalog. This will ensure that you or your customer do not overpay for associated customs duties or tariffs. Shipwire allows you to directly confirm and/or input the desired commercial invoice values on an order-by-order basis.
This feature is available on step 2 (Shipping) of the Ship from Warehouse flow under the Ship tab in your account dashboard. You now have the option to modify your invoice:
There you can manually edit the appropriate values:
Highlights of the Commercial Invoice
The image included below (click image to enlarge) highlights a number of the key fields that are used to populate the commercial invoice. Find quick links immediately below this image to set any of the missing fields:
Quick Links
EIN: You can set your EIN in your Shipwire account under My Account->Account Setup->Billing (and editing), or by going to this link. Learn more about the EIN here.
Manage Products: You can edit all of the product-related details under My Account->Store->Manage Products, or by going to this link. HINT: If you have many products to edit, it may be faster to use our Spreadsheet upload. Simply click on the ‘Upload Spreadsheet’ from within Manage Products, and download the template. It will autopopulate with all of your existing products. You can then add the missing fields. For international order processing, only the Country of Manufacture is required (the HTS field is optional).
Learn more about the HTS and Made In field requirements here.