Gift, sale or sample: choosing the customs category
Five boxes, five meanings, and the one that saves you paying duty twice.
Every customs declaration asks you to tick a category. There are usually five, and they look interchangeable. They are not: the category determines how the destination country treats the parcel, and getting it wrong is the second most common cause of a customs delay after a vague description.
The five categories
Sale of goods
Someone paid you for the contents. This is the correct answer for almost every parcel a seller sends, and it is the one people avoid because it is the one that attracts duty and import VAT.
If there is an order number, an invoice, or a payment, it is a sale. What the recipient calls it does not change that.
Gift
Something given freely, person to person, with no payment involved.
Most countries allow a higher duty-free allowance on genuine gifts, which is exactly why the box is scrutinised. A parcel sent from a business address, containing three identical items, declared as a gift, does not read as one.
When customs disagree, the parcel is held, the recipient is asked to prove what they paid, and it arrives late with duty owed anyway. You have saved nothing and annoyed a customer.
There is a narrower point worth knowing: in many jurisdictions a gift has to be between private individuals. A business cannot send a gift to a customer in the customs sense, even when it genuinely is one.
Commercial sample
Goods sent to a business to demonstrate a product, with no sale attached. Often required to be marked or of nominal value so they cannot be resold.
Legitimate and useful if you are approaching wholesale buyers. Not a way to describe a paid order.
Documents
Paper with no commercial value: contracts, certificates, printed matter. Many countries clear documents without duty and with lighter paperwork.
The trap is that anything physical alongside the paper makes it no longer a documents shipment. A contract plus a promotional mug is a goods shipment.
Returned goods
The category almost nobody uses, and the one that most often saves money.
If a customer returns something to you, or you are sending a repaired item back, declaring it as returned goods can avoid duty being charged a second time on goods that already cleared customs once. Rules vary by country and there are usually conditions, such as a time limit and evidence of the original export.
If you handle cross-border returns and you have been ticking “sale of goods”, you have very likely been paying duty twice.
Why the wrong category costs more than it saves
The parcel is held. Customs asks the recipient for proof of value. That adds days, and the recipient has to do work they did not sign up for.
Duty is charged anyway, plus a handling fee. Carriers charge for presenting goods to customs. On a small parcel that fee is often larger than the duty.
Your compensation is capped. If the parcel is lost, you are covered for the value you declared. A 60 pound item declared at 10 is insured for 10.
Practical guidance
- If money changed hands, it is a sale. Every time.
- Use “gift” only for actual gifts between individuals, and expect it to be checked if the sender looks like a business.
- Learn the returned-goods rules for the countries you trade with most. That is where the real saving is.
- The category is not the only field that matters. A correct category with a description reading “goods” will still get the parcel opened.
What this site does
Labelbench puts the category on the label and on the CN23, and defaults to sale of goods, because that is the honest answer for most parcels a seller sends.
It does not advise on duty rates or thresholds. Those change often enough that any figure printed here would be wrong within months, and a confidently wrong number is worse than none.