Importing from China to Singapore

GST, at 9%. It is charged on the CIF value — the cost of the goods plus insurance plus freight to Singapore — plus any duty, where duty applies. Note that freight is inside the taxable base, which means the tax on an air shipment is higher than on a sea shipment of identical goods.

Duty, almost never. Singapore is a free port and the overwhelming majority of tariff lines are zero. Excise duty applies to intoxicating liquors, tobacco products, motor vehicles and petroleum products, and to essentially nothing else. If you are importing consumer electronics, accessories, housewares, apparel or almost any general merchandise, duty is not part of your calculation.

The permit. Every import requires a Customs permit declared through TradeNet before arrival. Most importers do this through their freight forwarder or a declaring agent rather than directly, and the fee is small — but the permit is not optional and goods without one do not clear.

GST registration changes the arithmetic completely. A GST-registered business claims import GST back as input tax, so for a registered importer the 9% is a cash-flow item rather than a cost. For a business below the registration threshold it is a real 9% on landed value. That single fact is often the difference between an import being worth doing and not, and it is worth settling before the first order rather than after.

This is the most consequential change to Singapore import rules in years and the advice online has not caught up.

Before 1 January 2023, goods imported by air or post with a CIF value at or below S$400 were not charged GST. It made small e-commerce consignments materially cheaper than the same goods bought locally, which is precisely why it was removed.

Since then, low-value goods are chargeable. GST is collected either by the overseas vendor at the point of sale, where that vendor is registered for Singapore GST under the overseas vendor regime, or on import. The practical effect for a business buying samples and small batches from China is that the small parcels which used to arrive clean now carry tax.

The mistake this produces is a pricing one rather than a compliance one: a landed-cost model built on pre-2023 assumptions understates every small shipment by 9%, and on thin-margin goods that is the whole margin. If your costing spreadsheet has a "no GST under S$400" line in it, that line is wrong.

The China–Singapore lane is short, which changes the usual calculation. Sea freight from the main South China ports is a matter of days rather than the weeks a Europe or US run takes, so the classic "air is fast, sea is cheap" trade-off is much narrower here than the general advice assumes.

Sea, full container. The cheapest per unit by a wide margin once you can fill a container, and the right answer for anything heavy or bulky.

Sea, LCL. You pay for the space you use plus a share of handling. Frequently the right answer for a few pallets, though the handling and destination charges are a larger proportion than newcomers expect and are where LCL quotes diverge most.

Air. Justified by value density and by urgency, not by size. It also raises your GST, because freight sits inside the CIF base.

Note the constraint that overrides all of this for anything with a lithium cell in it: power banks and loose lithium batteries are dangerous goods, forbidden as cargo on passenger aircraft, and must ship at no more than 30% state of charge. That is not a preference, it is what determines whether an air option exists at all.

We deliberately publish no freight rates. They move weekly, and a number written here would be misleading within a month — which is also why a freight calculator is not on this site.

Undervaluation on the invoice. A supplier offering to declare a lower value is offering to make you liable for an understated declaration. GST is assessed on CIF, and the exposure sits with the importer of record — which is you, not the factory in Shenzhen.

The wrong HS code. Classification determines duty and controls. Getting it wrong on a duty-free good rarely costs tax, but it can put you into a controlled category and hold the shipment while it is sorted out.

Controlled goods that did not look controlled. Telecommunications and radio equipment, certain electrical products, and anything with a power supply may require registration or approval from the relevant Singapore authority. A Bluetooth speaker is a radio transmitter, and that is not obvious from the packing list.

No inspection before shipment. Singapore is a short lane, which tempts people to skip pre-shipment inspection because the goods will arrive quickly. But a fast-arriving defective container is still a defective container, and sending it back to China costs more than the inspection would have.

Assuming a Singapore address makes it a domestic purchase. Buying from a China-based seller with a Singapore warehouse can mean the import already happened, or it can mean it has not; the distinction determines who holds the GST liability and the permit obligation.

This site is operated by Shenzhen Sunning Tension Industrial Co., Ltd., a company in Shenzhen and not in Singapore, and it sells consumer electronics here in its own name — so the China end of this route is worked rather than read about. What is left in Singapore is infrastructure: the site, its database and its mail are hosted there.

The practical advantages are real and are not specific to us: the transit is short, so a problem found at destination can be corrected in weeks rather than a season; the port is one of the world's largest, so sailings are frequent and consolidation options are good; and the duty position is simple enough that landed cost is genuinely predictable, which is unusual.

The work that is hard to do at a distance — establishing that a supplier is a manufacturer rather than a reseller, checking specifications and certification before money moves, inspecting before the goods ship — belongs to the company selling you the goods: the member factory whose listing you enquired on, or, in consumer electronics, Shenzhen Sunning Tension Industrial Co., Ltd. What this site does is narrower: it checks who a company is and what licence it holds before it can be listed, and puts your enquiry in front of it.

If you know what you want made, the sourcing request page is the place to describe it. If you want the cost picture before speaking to anyone, the guide on what sourcing from China actually costs sets out the whole bill.