Landed Cost
by
Cost accuracy for ecommerce teams: recompute landed cost per SKU whenever duty, freight or FX moves, and flag the products now selling below target.
Landed cost gets calculated once, at launch, and then quietly goes stale. Freight rates move, duty classifications change, the currency you buy in shifts a few percent, and none of that reaches the cost field the margin reports read. So the business keeps reporting the margin it had two years ago and pricing against it, while the real margin drifts down a point at a time. Nobody notices because every report agrees with every other report. This skill recomputes landed cost per SKU whenever duty, freight or FX moves, and flags the products now selling below target.
What It Does
- Recomputes landed cost per SKU from current freight, duty, FX and handling.
- Allocates shipment-level costs to units the way the shipment actually loaded.
- Tracks how far each SKU's cost has moved since the price was set.
- Flags the products now selling below their target margin.
- Separates a cost increase you can pass on from one you cannot.
- Updates the cost per SKU, with what changed and by how much.
Use Cases
- Catch the SKU whose margin has quietly fallen eleven points.
- Reprice after a duty change rather than a quarter later.
- Allocate freight by volume rather than evenly across units.
- See which products are now below target margin.
Example Session
Duty went up on this category. What does that do to our margins?
Three SKUs fall below target. One has been below for two quarters already.
- SKU | Cost at launch | Cost now | Margin then | Margin now | Status
- Jacket, navy | $71.00 | $79.40 | 61% | 56% | Above target
- Tee, black | $9.20 | $11.80 | 46% | 31% | Below target
- Cap, charcoal | $5.40 | $6.10 | 57% | 52% | Above target
- Hoodie, oatmeal | $18.60 | $24.30 | 48% | 32% | Below target since Q2
The hoodie is the one that matters: freight and FX moved it eleven points before this duty change, and nobody repriced because the cost field never updated. It has been selling below target for two quarters. The tee crosses now. The jacket absorbs the increase and stays comfortably above, so it needs no action.
Why This Beats Prompting It Yourself
A Cost Set At Launch vs The Cost Today: The Hidden Risk
A generic prompt computes margin from the cost field in your system, which is the correct input and is stale. Every report then agrees, because they all read the same out-of-date number. A product that has lost eleven points to freight and FX looks healthy in every view until someone counts the cash at the end of a quarter.
When You Still Need The Increase You Cannot Pass On
Not every cost increase becomes a price increase. This skill separates the SKUs where demand supports repricing from the ones where it does not, because the second group needs a different answer: a specification change, a different supplier, or a decision to accept the lower margin deliberately rather than by default.
Known Limitations
Allocating shipment-level freight to units is only as accurate as the volume and weight data on your products, and SKUs missing those are allocated evenly with that flagged. Duty depends on classification, which the skill takes as given rather than determining. FX uses the rate at the time of payment where available and the shipment date otherwise. It updates the cost figures and does not change prices.
Install It
- Download the ZIP.
It is free and there is no account to create. - Unzip it into your agent's skills folder.
Claude Code reads ~/.claude/skills/, which is hidden by default: the command in the folder block opens it. Other agents scan their own directory, so drop the same folder there instead. - Ask your agent to use it.
Restart the agent if it was already running, then it picks the skill up with no config.
skills folder
Copy
~/.claude/skills/landed-cost/
SKILL.md
references/cost-components.md
costs/
# one file per run, with what moved
# macOS: create the folder and open it in Finder
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && open ~/.claude/skills
# Windows: paste in the Explorer address bar
%USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills\Frequently asked questions
How is this different from the cost field in my inventory system?
That field holds whatever was entered when the product was set up. This recomputes it from current freight, duty, FX and handling, allocates shipment costs to units properly, and tells you which products have crossed below target since.
Which agents does the skill run in?
Any agent that supports the open SKILL.md format: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Manus, Grok and others load it unmodified. The format is portable, the location is not. Each agent scans its own skills directory, so you drop the same folder into whichever one yours uses. There is no config file to edit and no API key to provision.
What does it need connected to work?
Purchase orders with unit costs, freight invoices, duty rates and classifications, FX rates at payment, and product volume or weight. Missing volume data means freight is allocated evenly, which the output flags.
Why does freight allocation matter?
Because a shipment carries products of very different sizes, and splitting the freight evenly across units overstates the cost of small items and understates the bulky ones. On a mixed container that error is several points of margin in both directions.
Should every cost increase become a price increase?
No. Some products absorb it and some cannot be repriced without losing volume. The skill flags which is which, and a deliberate decision to accept a lower margin is a perfectly good answer as long as somebody makes it.
What is included with the skill?
The skill itself, the cost component reference, the update format, and the allocation rules. It is free and security scanned. We re-publish the ZIP when the model changes, so download it again if your costs start shifting.
Landed cost moves every margin downstream of it.
Polar recomputes contribution margin across 45+ sources when duty, freight or FX shifts, so pricing and buying see the new number at the same time.
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