The number says who you are. It does not say what you may move.

The two boxes

There is one habit that makes this whole subject tractable, and it takes about ten seconds to learn. Every fact about an intended import or export belongs in one of two boxes.

Box one is about you. Who is trading. From what address. Through which bank account. In what legal form — as yourself, as a partnership, as a company. These are facts about a person or an entity, they are already recorded somewhere, and they do not change when your product changes.

Box two is about the goods. Whether this particular item may be moved at all. Under what description it travels. What duty follows from that description. Whether a separate permission attaches to it. Whether the destination will accept it. These are facts about a thing, they are not recorded anywhere in advance, and they change completely the moment you change what you are selling.

People do not make this distinction, and the reason they do not is reasonable: both boxes feel like “the paperwork for exporting”, and they are sold together by people who present a registration as a readiness. The distinction matters because the two boxes behave completely differently. Box one is cheap, fast, and settled once. Box two is item-specific, costs real money to get wrong, and has to be redone every time the product line changes.

What the number actually does

The code identifies you. When a consignment moves, the system needs to know who is behind it, and the code is the handle by which you are recognised. It links a transaction to a person, an address and an account. That is a genuinely useful thing and it is why you cannot operate without it.

What it is not is a statement about your trade. It carries no information about your goods, because none was supplied. It makes no finding that you are capable of exporting, that your product is exportable, or that your arrangement is sound. It is closer to a registration number on a vehicle than to a licence to drive a particular load.

Holding it is therefore necessary and nowhere near sufficient, and the whole difficulty of this subject is that the necessary part arrives first, arrives easily, and feels like an achievement.

Granted on who you are

Look at what is actually examined before the code is issued. Your identity. An address you can evidence. A bank account in the name of the entity. The legal form that entity takes. Everything on that list is a fact about an existing person or an existing body, verifiable against records that already exist.

That is exactly why it is quick. There is nothing to assess, only things to match. A process that checks whether two records agree can be fast and still be rigorous, because agreement is a yes-or-no question with an answer sitting in a file.

And it is why the common failure in obtaining one is never a refusal on merit. It is a mismatch — which is a subject of its own, and one we come back to.

What nobody asked

Now read that list again for what is missing from it.

• Nobody asked what you intend to move.
• Nobody asked where you intend to move it.
• Nobody asked what it is worth, or how much of it there will be.
• Nobody asked whether anybody at the other end has agreed to receive it.
• Nobody asked how it will be described, which, as you will see, is the sentence everything turns on.

This is not a gap in the process. A permission granted without knowing what it will be used for cannot be a permission about the use. The code was never intended to answer those questions, and reading it as though it had is the error this page exists to prevent.

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Why the easiness is a warning

Here is an assumption that works almost everywhere else and fails here. In most registration subjects, difficulty tracks risk. Something hard to obtain was hard because an examination happened before you got it, and the difficulty itself carries a message: somebody looked.

That relationship is broken in this one. The code is easy because the examination relevant to your trade is not performed at that counter at all. It is performed later, by a different set of people, against the goods rather than against you.

So the honest reading of a fast approval is not “this is going well”. It is “nothing about my product has been looked at yet, and the looking is still ahead of me.”

Speed read as endorsement

People read speed as approval because, in ordinary life, it usually is. A loan sanctioned quickly, a visa granted quickly, a clearance that comes through without queries — in each of those, speed genuinely signals that a reviewer found nothing to query.

The misreading here is quiet and it has a consequence. Somebody who believes they have been approved stops looking. They do not ask the question about the description, they do not write to the buyer, they do not price the duty, because the system appeared to tell them they were fine.

The remedy is not caution in general, which is useless advice. It is one specific substitution: treat the approval as information about what was checked, not about whether you are ready. It checked who you are. It is silent on everything else, and silence is not a clean bill.

Sorting a fact into its box

Take the facts of a typical first export and sort them, and the shape becomes obvious.

Two things are worth noticing in that third column. The first two rows are the only ones you decide. And the last row contains no Indian authority at all — which is a thing people discover far too late, and the subject of its own section below.

Who decides each one

The reason to look at who decides, rather than only at what is decided, is that it tells you where to go and how early. A question you decide yourself can be settled today. A question decided by the nature of your goods needs somebody who reads that for a living. A question decided abroad needs somebody abroad, and a reply from abroad is never quick.

So the sequence falls out of the table rather than having to be memorised. Settle what is yours. Commission what belongs to the goods. Write, early, to the side you do not control.

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Inside the goods box

Four questions live in box two, and they are not independent of each other. The description drives the classification; the classification drives both the duty and whether any separate permission applies; and the destination applies its own version of all of it at the far end.

Which means they collapse into one practical instruction. Get the description right first, because everything else in the box is downstream of it, and an error there propagates into every other answer without announcing itself.

The description decides

Goods travel under a description. That sentence sounds administrative and it is the most consequential fact in the trade.

The description is read by everybody downstream of you — the bank that handles the money, the carrier, the authorities at the point of departure, the authorities at the point of arrival, and the buyer’s agent who has to clear it. None of them can ask you what you meant. They read the words, and the words determine what the goods are treated as.

People write it last, in a hurry, copying something from a quotation or from a competitor’s invoice. It is the one line on the whole set that deserves to be written first and checked by somebody competent.

You never choose the classification

Here is the asymmetry that makes a casual description dangerous.

You choose the words. You do not choose the classification. Your goods have a place in the classification whether or not you know what it is, decided by what they are rather than by what you call them. Your description either corresponds to that place or it contradicts it.

And a contradiction is not the same kind of event as an error. Getting something wrong and declaring something inaccurately sit in different categories with different consequences, and the gap between them is the reason you should never choose a description because of what it would cost or save you. A description chosen for its consequences is a different thing from a description chosen for its accuracy, and the difference is visible from outside more often than people expect, because the goods are present and can be looked at.

Plain language is not the description

Plain language is a virtue in most writing. It is not the same as the correct description, and the gap between them is where first consignments get stuck.

Two products that any ordinary person would describe in identical words can sit in different places, because the distinction between them is a technical one about material, process or function. Two that sound completely unrelated can sit together. There is no reliable way to work this out from intuition, and reconstructing it from an old invoice is worse than useless, because you inherit somebody else’s error along with their wording.

This is a job for a person who does customs classification as their work. It is not an expensive thing to commission and it is one of the few places in a small business where an hour of specialist time pays for itself outright.

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Duty belongs in the price

Duty is not an administrative afterthought. It is a cost, and like every other cost it belongs in the price before the price is given to anybody.

The reason it gets left out is sequencing. A first-time exporter thinks in terms of what the goods cost to make, what the freight is, and what margin is wanted. Duty arrives later, as part of a conversation that feels procedural rather than commercial, and by then a figure has already been sent.

Because duty follows classification, and classification follows the goods, you cannot know your landed cost until the description is settled. Which gives you a rule of order rather than a rule of arithmetic: settle the description, then price.

The price quoted too soon

The commonest sequence in a first export is this. A buyer is found. A price is quoted, because the buyer asked for one and enthusiasm is high. The price is accepted. Only then does anybody work out the classification, and with it the duty, and with it the fact that the transaction was never going to make money.

At that point there are three options and all of them are bad. Go back to the buyer and reprice, which costs the relationship at its most fragile moment. Ship at a loss to protect it. Or find a description that produces a better answer, which is the road that ends somewhere much worse than a thin margin.

Three kinds of item

At the level of principle, goods fall into three groups. Most may be moved freely. Some may be moved only with a specific permission obtained for the purpose. A small set may not be moved at all.

We are not going to tell you which group your product is in, and the refusal is deliberate rather than unhelpful. It is a determination about your goods, it changes, and the consequence of being wrong on our say-so would land entirely on you. What we will do, free and on a call, is tell you that this is a question, who answers it, and why it has to be answered before anything is promised to anybody.

The biggest category is the least checked

Here is the shape of the trap, and it is a general one worth carrying into other subjects.

The freely movable group is by far the largest. Most people, most of the time, are in it. Which means that anybody who assumes their product is freely movable will be right on almost every occasion, and the assumption will be reinforced each time.

The cost of checking is an hour. The cost of the one occasion is a consignment. That ratio is why this is worth doing even though it will feel like a formality every single time.

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Check the item, not your memory of it

Two more things make this trap sharper than it looks. Products change — a formulation, a material, a component, a grade — and a change that is commercially trivial can move an item across a line. And people check once, at the start, and then carry the answer forward for years while the product and the rules both move underneath it.

So the habit is not “check before you start”. It is check the item you are actually shipping, this time, whenever the item is not identical to the last one you checked. That is a small discipline and it is the entire protection.

The small consignment illusion

A sample is small. A small thing feels informal. An informal thing goes out as an ordinary parcel, through a courier, described loosely, because it is only a sample and nobody is making money on it yet.

The rule does not get smaller because the parcel does. Value and quantity affect plenty of things; they do not generally change whether an item may move, or what it is, or what it must be described as. A sample that is treated as a personal package has not been exported properly; it has been exported in a way that avoided finding anything out.

Send the sample properly

Which is a pity, because the sample is a gift. It is the cheapest possible place in the whole venture to be wrong about your own product.

Sent properly — with the description you intend to use, through the route you intend to use, under the entity you intend to trade through — a sample is a rehearsal. If something about the description is wrong, you find out while the stake is one small box. If the destination has a requirement nobody mentioned, you find out before a container exists.

Sent casually, it teaches you nothing, and worse, it teaches you something false: that this is all much simpler than it is.

The other country is not our customer

Everything up to this point has been about the Indian side, and the Indian side is only half the transaction. The other half is governed by people who have never heard of you and who answer to nobody here.

The destination has its own import rules, its own standards, its own labelling and marking requirements, its own certification and testing expectations, and sometimes its own quantitative limits. None of that is affected by your code, by your description, or by how carefully you did everything on this page. It is a separate system with a separate answer.

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Nobody here can give you that

This is worth stating bluntly, because it is routinely sold as though it were otherwise.

• No Indian registration grants you entry anywhere else.
• No Indian consultant can promise what another country’s authorities will accept, however confidently they speak.
• No Indian authority has any say in it.
• And a clean Indian export is entirely compatible with goods that are refused at the far end.

If somebody tells you that a particular Indian registration or certificate “takes care of” the destination side, that is the sentence to stop on. Ask which authority in which country is bound by it. There will not be an answer.

Ask the buyer in writing

The person who can actually tell you is on the other side: your buyer, and more precisely the clearing agent your buyer uses. They do this every week, in that country, for goods like yours.

So the single most valuable email a first-time exporter ever sends is short and goes out before anything moves. It asks the buyer to confirm, in writing, what their side requires — documents, certifications, markings, language on the label — and to confirm that their clearing agent has seen the product description you intend to use.

Two things make this worth insisting on even when it feels fussy. A written answer can be acted on and an enthusiastic verbal one cannot. And asking the question forces the buyer to go and check, which is frequently the first time anybody on that side actually has. A buyer who wants your goods and a buyer who has verified that your goods can be landed are often the same person at two different moments.

Goods that cannot land

It is worth knowing the shape of this failure, because it is unlike the others on this page.

The goods are somewhere. They are accruing charges every day they sit. Nobody at the destination has a use for them, because the only buyer is the one who cannot clear them. Bringing them home costs freight again and may not be straightforward. Abandoning them has its own consequences. And none of it is a dispute you can win, because nobody has done anything wrong — the goods simply do not meet a requirement nobody checked.

That outcome is avoidable for the price of one email, sent early. It is worth being almost rude about getting an answer.

The import direction

The same identification serves both directions, and the contents of box two change completely when you reverse the arrow.

On an import, the duty is yours rather than the counterparty’s, which means the pricing problem described above lands directly on your own margin. The classification argument is one you will be making on your own behalf rather than watching somebody else make. And the question of what may enter is now an Indian question rather than a foreign one, which cuts both ways: you can get a reliable answer here, and you are the person who has to live with it.

People who have exported comfortably for years sometimes find their first import noticeably harder, and this is why. The hard questions have moved from somebody else’s desk to theirs.

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The bank is a party to this

Registration is a conversation with a register. A trade is a conversation with a bank, and the bank asks questions that nobody asked at registration.

The account named on your record is the account through which the money is expected to move. How the payment arrives matters, and so does the paperwork that closes the transaction out at the end. This is not an incidental administrative tail; it is the part of the trade where the money actually becomes yours, and it has its own requirements that are entirely separate from everything on the goods side.

The two legs are one plan

The reason people meet that problem is sequencing again. The goods leg feels like the real work and gets planned first; the money leg feels like something that will sort itself out once the goods are gone.

Treat them as one plan made at the same time. Before the first shipment, you should be able to say, in one breath: what is being sent, under what description, to whom, on what terms, paid how, into which account, and closed out with what paperwork. If any clause of that sentence is blank, that is the clause that will cost you.

Where the terms between you and the counterparty are anything other than trivial, put them in a written agreement rather than in a chain of messages. The cost of doing that before a dispute is a fraction of the cost of reconstructing what was agreed afterwards.

The paper travels, you do not

There is a feature of this subject that does not exist in most documentation work. Your documents go somewhere you are not, and are read by people who cannot ask you anything.

In ordinary life, a document that is ambiguous gets clarified: somebody rings you, you explain, it is fine. Here, the set travels ahead of the goods into a sequence of hands — bank, carrier, authorities, agent, buyer — and at each pair of hands the document is simply read. Nobody is going to call Delhi to ask what you meant by a word.

Which produces one discipline and it is worth more than it sounds: the same goods are described the same way on every document in the set. Three different descriptions of the same consignment, each written by a different person in a hurry, is the commonest wholly avoidable problem in a first shipment, and it is avoidable because you are the author of all three.

One entity, one number

The code belongs to the entity, not to the human being who applied for it. That sounds like a technicality and it has a sharp practical edge.

If you trade as yourself and later form a company or an LLP, that new body is a different legal person. It is not you with a new hat on. Which means:

• The code does not come with you. The new entity needs its own.
• The bank account does not come with you. The new entity needs its own, and the record has to point at it.
• Your contracts do not come with you unless somebody deliberately moves them, which is a document, not an assumption.
• Your buyer’s own records — their vendor file, their approvals, their payment instructions — name the old entity, and changing them is their internal process, on their timetable.

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A change of form costs most when it works

Now notice when people decide to change form. They do it when the business is going well — when there is turnover worth protecting, buyers worth keeping, and a reason to limit liability.

Which is precisely the worst moment for the switching cost, because every item in that list above now has something riding on it. An empty new entity is free to create. An entity that has to inherit a live trade, mid-season, with orders in progress, is not.

Decide the form first

So the order of operations is the reverse of how it usually happens. Decide what you are going to be, then register, then trade — rather than trade, succeed, and reorganise.

That decision is not an export question and should not be made on export grounds alone. It turns on liability, on who you intend to contract with, on what your buyers and your bank expect to see, and on how you want profits treated. Our proprietorship guide sets out that comparison properly; the only thing the export side adds is the switching cost, and it adds it heavily.

If you genuinely do not know, the question to ask yourself is narrower than the whole decision: do I expect to change form within the next two years? If the answer is yes or probably, do it now while nothing is attached to the old shape.

The obligation nobody invoices you for

The code does not expire the way a licence expires, and people hear that as “so I can forget about it”. There is an obligation to keep it current, and the difficulty with that obligation is a general one worth naming in plain terms.

This is not a point about this registration in particular. It is a pattern: across a small business, the items most likely to be sitting quietly out of order are the free ones, precisely because nothing in the accounting system ever mentions them. The fix is equally general — one named person, one calendar, one folder — and it is the same fix that keeps company filings and returns from drifting.

You learn about it at a consignment

The second half of that problem is where the discovery happens. A lapsed payment-bearing obligation announces itself at a desk, in an office, with a reminder. This one announces itself at a consignment — which is to say with goods already in motion, a buyer already waiting, and a clock already running.

That asymmetry is the whole argument for treating an obligation with no invoice as more dangerous than one with a fee, rather than less. The fee is not the burden. The reminder was the benefit.

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The three records that must agree

Now the practical part, and the one that decides whether this easy thing is actually easy for you. This rarely goes wrong by refusal. It goes wrong because records that were each perfectly correct on their own do not agree with one another.

• The name, carrying a middle name or an initial in one record and not in another; an expansion in one and an abbreviation in another; a spelling that was corrected in one place and never anywhere else.
• The address, updated when you moved for the records you thought of and not for the ones you did not.
• The bank account, held in a slightly different style of the same name, or in the name of a person where the entity is something else.
• The entity itself, where the business trades under one name and is legally something with another.

Any one of those will hold things up, and the frustrating part is that each record is internally right. Nothing is false. They simply do not match, and matching is what this particular process does.

A mismatch is not a refusal

It is worth separating these in your head, because they feel the same when you are waiting and they need completely different responses.

A refusal is a decision against you on merit and would require a reason. A mismatch is a mechanical failure to reconcile, it says nothing about you, and the remedy is to correct a record rather than to argue a case. Where the mismatch is in your own identity documents it has its own route and its own guide, and it is worth fixing properly rather than working around, because the same mismatch will surface again at every counter for years.

What we do before lodging anything is read the three records against each other and tell you where they diverge. It is unglamorous and it is most of the value in a service like this one.

Goods, or only money

A large share of the people who ask about this do not move goods at all. They provide services, are paid from abroad, and have been told — sometimes correctly, sometimes not — that they need to register.

Ask one clean question and most of the confusion dissolves. Is something crossing a border, or is only money crossing?

Where nothing physical moves, most of box two simply does not arise: there is no description, no classification, no duty, no destination clearance. What remains are questions about how you are paid, how it is recorded, and how it is treated for tax — a different subject with different advisers. Where something does move, even something small and incidental to a service, box two is live and the whole of this page applies.

We will tell you free, on a call, which of those you are. It takes a minute, and it stops people buying registrations they do not need because somebody sold them a bundle.

The marketplace question

Selling through an online marketplace that handles the shipping is the case where people most often guess, and guessing is unnecessary because there is a precise question to ask.

Who is named as the exporter on the paperwork? Some arrangements put the platform in that position. Some put you there while feeling, from your side of the screen, exactly as though they do not — you pack a box, hand it over, and a system does the rest.

Ask the platform, in writing, and keep the answer. Do not infer it from how the arrangement feels, and do not infer it from what another seller told you, because the same platform can operate differently in different programmes. If you are the exporter of record, everything on this page is yours, including the description.

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The number is not a business

There is a particular kind of purchase people make at the start of a venture, and this is one of them. The venture is uncertain, the work ahead is vague, and here is something concrete that can be bought today and ticked off. So it gets bought, and it produces a real feeling of progress.

We will happily sell it to you, and we are going to say the unhelpful thing anyway. Holding the code is not the same as being ready to trade, and it was never the thing standing between you and an export. The things standing there are in box two, they cost nothing to identify, and they are still there the morning the number arrives.

The bundle problem

A related thing to watch for. Registrations are frequently sold in packages — a code, a tax registration, a small-business certificate, a certificate of some other kind, all together at an attractive combined price.

A bundle is a price, not a diagnosis. Some of those may be required for you, some may be irrelevant, and the package does not distinguish, because it was assembled before anybody knew anything about your case. The specific confusion we see most often is between this code and tax registration: two different systems asking two different questions, which happen to arrive at the same point in a person’s life and are therefore assumed to be one decision. Whether you need either is determined separately, and the answer to one tells you nothing about the other.

The same goes for the rest. An MSME certificate, a trademark, a signing certificate — each is a real thing that is right for some people and unnecessary for others, and each deserves its own yes or no.

The first order problem

Here is the sequence that produces most of the panic we see, and it is almost universal.

Nothing happens for months. Then an enquiry turns into a real order, with a quantity, a price and a date. Only at that point does anybody find out what is needed, and now every single question in box two has to be answered under time pressure, with a buyer waiting and a relationship at stake. Classification gets rushed. The destination side gets assumed. A price has already been given.

None of those questions got harder because the order arrived. They got more expensive, which is a different thing, and the difference is entirely about when they were asked.

Get it while nothing waits on it

Which gives the only piece of timing advice on this page, and it is about more than the code itself.

So do the identity side early, while it is boring. Use the same sitting to commission the classification and to write to the prospective buyer. By the time a real order arrives, the only thing left to do is the thing you are good at, which is selling.

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Where we stop

It is only fair to be explicit about the line, because a great deal of this page is us telling you that the important questions are not ours.

We are documentation people. We are good at getting an entity correctly on a register, at making records agree, and at telling you plainly which questions are still open. We are not customs classification specialists, we are not your advocate, and we are not a trade consultancy.

What that means in practice is that we will tell you a question exists, who answers it, and roughly what asking costs — and then we will stop, rather than giving you a cheap answer that you will price a deal against. An approximate answer to a classification question is worse than no answer, because no answer makes you go and find out.

Who writes to us for this

Four kinds of enquiry arrive, and they need different first replies.

• Somebody with an idea and no buyer. The easiest and the most useful conversation, because everything can be done in the right order. This is who the timing section above is written for.
• Somebody with an order in hand. Urgent, and the registration is usually the least of it. We do the registration fast and we spend the first call on what else has to happen in parallel.
• Somebody who sells services and has been told they need this. Often they do not, and that is a two-minute conversation we are glad to have for nothing.
• Somebody changing legal form who has discovered that the code does not come with them. Usually mid-trade, usually under pressure, and the sequence matters: the new entity, the account, the record, then the counterparties.

What we need exactly right

Short list, and every item is a matching exercise rather than a judgement.

• The entity you will actually trade through — not the one you might form later, and not the brand you trade under if that is not the legal person.
• The name, exactly as other records hold it, including whatever initial or expansion they carry.
• The address you can evidence, and which the other records already show.
• The bank account that will genuinely receive the money, in the entity’s name and style.
• Whether your case will also need a signing certificate, which depends on your form and what else you are filing.

We read these against each other before anything is lodged. Where they diverge we come back to you with exactly what diverges, so that you fix a record rather than guess at which version to use.

What we lodge and hand back

The lodging itself, the follow-through, and then the handover, which we try to make slightly more useful than a forwarded file.

• The code, with the record as lodged, so that you can see what the register now says about you rather than only the number.
• A note of which account and which address are on the record, because those are the two things that go out of date first and nobody remembers what was submitted.
• A plain written statement of the box-two questions that remain open in your case, which is the part of this that we think is worth paying for.
• A short call if you want one, to go through that list rather than read it.

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Where the goods question starts

The handover is also where we hand the subject over. From that point the questions stop being about you and start being about what you are moving, and the people to take them to are different people.

• Classification and duty — a customs broker or a classification specialist, before any price is quoted.
• Whether the item may move — the same adviser, on the specific goods, each time the goods change.
• The destination side — your buyer and their clearing agent, in writing.
• The money leg — your bank, at the same time as the goods leg and not after it.
• Anything that has gone wrong — an advocate, quickly, before a reply is sent.

We will tell you which of those your case actually needs. We will not stand in for any of them.

What we will not describe

And the refusals, stated in advance so that nobody has to discover them halfway through.

• We will not classify your goods or tell you where they sit.
• We will not quote a duty, or confirm one you have been told by somebody else.
• We will not tell you whether your item may be moved.
• We will not write a description chosen for its consequences, or describe anything as something it is not, for any reason and at any price.
• We will not advise on a seizure, a penalty, a demand or an allegation — those are an advocate’s, and asking late is what makes them worse.
• We will not let you leave believing that the code clears the trade, because that belief is the most expensive thing in this subject.

The fourth of those is the one worth dwelling on, because it is occasionally asked of us politely and as though it were a small favour. It is not a small favour and the answer does not change.

Our fee on this registration

Our part for an import export code — the entity question, reconciling the name, address and bank records before anything is lodged, the lodging and follow-through, and the written note of which box-two questions remain open in your case — is ₹1,499, with a turnaround of 2 – 5 days. If you reached us through our IEC registration listing, it is the same work at the same figure.

That turnaround is short because the registration is genuinely straightforward once the records agree. What it does not cover, and what we say at the start rather than let the figure imply, is anything about your goods — that is not a turnaround but a determination, and it is not ours to make.

What stays separate, and why:

• Tax registration, which is a different system with its own test — that registration.
• Forming the entity, if you are going to change form — as a company, an LLP, or staying as you are after reading the comparison.
• A signing certificate where your case requires one — that is its own thing, and worth understanding before you hold one.
• A written contract with your counterparty, which is cheap now and irreplaceable later — drafting.
• Translation or legalisation, where a document of yours has to be read or relied on abroad — translation, apostille assistance.
• Classification, duty and the destination side, which are not ours at any price.
• An advocate’s fee, wherever something has gone wrong rather than merely being unclear.

And the framing, because this is an inexpensive service and we would rather you knew where its value sits. Most of what you are paying for is not the lodging. It is that the entity named is the one you actually intend to trade through, that three records agree before anybody looks at them, and that somebody tells you plainly which of the goods-side questions are sitting unanswered in your particular case. If you would rather lodge it yourself, do — and ring us anyway for the second part, which we will give you for nothing, because a first exporter who knows what they still have to find out is worth more to us later than a fee today.

Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.

Selling to a buyer who buys by rule

Crossing a border is one kind of system to satisfy. Selling to a public buyer at home is another, and the adjustment there is larger than people expect: that buyer cannot prefer you, it eliminates before it compares, and most sellers who lose never lose on price at all. Our guide to registering as a seller for public buying sets out what replaces the relationship you are used to selling on.

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Questions people actually ask