Import guides

Written from the entry, not from a keyword list

Every guide below started as a question an importer asked after something had already gone wrong. Why the continuous bond had to be replaced in the middle of the year. Why a product imported cleanly for six years was suddenly inside an antidumping scope ruling. Why a parcel that used to clear on the manifest now needs an entry of its own. Rather than retype the answer into another email, we wrote it down properly once.

That is also why they read the way they do. There is no opening paragraph explaining that global trade is complex, and no closing paragraph inviting you to begin a journey with us. Each guide names the form or the regulation, states the deadline, and says what happens when you miss it. Where a figure matters, the figure is there. Where the rule moved recently, the guide says so instead of leaving a page written in 2019 sitting in the search results collecting clicks.

How the list is ordered

It runs from machinery to money. The first few explain how the system works at all: what a licensed broker is actually liable for, what happens between a booking and a delivery order, what a customs power of attorney signs you up to, and how to read the ten digits of an HTS number without guessing at the sixth. The middle set covers the filings with clocks attached, the bond, the ISF and FDA Prior Notice, where a missed window is a penalty rather than a delay. The last set is about what you pay: Section 301, antidumping and countervailing duties, drawback, and demurrage, which is not a duty at all but is the line item that most reliably turns a profitable import into a loss.

Who writes them

The same people who transmit the entries. There is no content team here and no agency working to a brief. That carries an obvious limitation, which is that these guides cover what we see: containers through the New York and New Jersey terminals, air freight, land crossings north and south, and ports across the country where we file without ever standing on the dock. It also carries the property you want from reference material, which is that everything in it has been done rather than researched.

What these pages cannot do

They cannot classify your product. A ten-digit number turns on the material breakdown, the function, the state of processing and sometimes the packaging, and lifting one from an article instead of from your own invoice is how importers end up filing a rate they cannot defend three years later on an audit. If you need certainty in writing, that is a binding ruling from CBP, and we prepare those. What these guides can do is tell you which questions apply to your goods and which of those questions have a deadline attached.

Tell us when a page goes stale

Trade rules have moved more in the last two years than in the decade before them. Section 232 metal content, the Section 301 lists, actions taken under IEEPA and the treatment of low-value shipments have all changed, and AD/CVD scope rulings issue continuously. If something here is out of date, write to info@dapecustoms.com. We would rather correct the page than have it quoted back at us from a terminal.