Four things get paid, at three different moments
Goods cost, which is the item price plus its domestic shipping to the warehouse. International freight, which depends on weight, method and destination. A customs declaration cost, listed on the official fees page as a small fixed amount that varies with the shipping method. And whatever your own country charges when the parcel lands.
You will not find rates on this site. They change with route, season and destination, and a guide that pins them down is a guide that lies to you three months later. What we can do is name every place a charge appears, so nothing catches you out.
Where each charge comes from
Every entry below names its source. Where the source is HubbuyCN, the wording is ours and the substance is theirs, read on 1 August 2026.
| Charge | Set by | When you see it |
|---|---|---|
| Item price | The marketplace seller | At order, in the rebuilt listing |
| Domestic shipping | The seller or their courier | At order, bundled into goods cost per the official fees page |
| International freight | The route you choose | When you submit the waybill, from weight, method and destination |
| Customs declaration | HubbuyCN, per the official fees page | A small fixed amount that depends on the shipping method |
| Insurance | Optional, at your choice | On the waybill screen, as its own line |
| Duty and import VAT | Your own country | According to current destination rules for the actual goods and value |
Getting a real number before you commit
HubbuyCN keeps a Freight Calculation entry in its main menu. When we opened it on 1 August 2026 it asked us to sign in first, so plan on having an account before you can price anything. We are not going to describe a screen we have not been able to use.
What you can read without an account is the official shipping cost page, which explains what the freight is calculated from. Either way, get the number before you order rather than after: a light cheap item can easily cost more to move than to buy, and that is a decision worth making while it is still hypothetical.
Customs
What the official page says, and what it admits
Use your destination’s current customs guidance for the actual goods and value. The agent’s older tariff page is a historical reference, not evidence of a current exemption or a universal weight threshold. Confirm route size and weight limits independently before creating the parcel.
It also ends with a sentence most sites would delete: that the information is collected from public sources, is for reference only, and cannot be treated as a standard. We are quoting that with the rest, because it is the part that tells you how much weight to put on the other numbers.
Three habits that keep customs boring
None of these are tricks, and none of them involve misdeclaring anything. Under declaring the value of a parcel is fraud in most of the countries this guide is read in, and it also voids any compensation claim.
Keep parcels personal sized
The official page warns that weight above a stated point starts to read as commercial, and that many identical items in one box do the same thing regardless of weight.
Know your own threshold
Your country sets the line, not the agent and not us. Look it up once for your own address and the whole question becomes arithmetic.
Keep the paperwork
The compensation page requires evidence for any claim. An invoice and photos taken before you unpack cost nothing and are impossible to recreate later.
What we will not do
Compare like-for-like quotes
You will find sites that publish a table of what each agent charges. We do not, for one reason: we cannot verify those numbers on any schedule that would keep them true, and a stale price is worse than no price because people plan around it.
The same applies to coupons. HubbuyCN runs promotional banners with amounts on them, and we have seen three different figures on three official images captured the same day. Those are campaign values. Anything on this site that looks like a number will name where it came from and when we read it.
Money, part three
The exchange rate is a cost, and it is the one nobody itemises
Sellers quote CNY. Your card settles in something else. A conversion happens in between, and unlike every other line on this page it never appears as a line. It is folded into the figure you were shown.
That matters more here than at most agents, because HubbuyCN states it adds nothing beyond goods, international shipping and duty, with the customs declaration usually RMB 8.00. When the fee column is genuinely empty, the conversion is the remaining place a margin could sit, and it is worth knowing how wide it is.
No figure for it appears here. A rate printed today is wrong tomorrow, and a rate quoted last week still reads like a promise and keeps none of it. Take the measurement yourself: pick an item priced at CN¥100, note the total your own currency is quoted before paying, and hold that against whatever a rate site shows for that same afternoon. Whatever separates the two is the spread, observed on the day it actually applied to you.