DDP vs FOB vs EXW: Shipping Custom Dice Without Surprises

The dice can be perfect and the delivery can still go wrong. A carton held at customs over a missing document, a "cheap" freight quote that doubles once destination fees appear, a duty invoice that lands the same week your campaign ships — nearly every importing horror story traces back to one line on the quote: the incoterm. Those three letters decide who books the freight, who clears customs and who pays what. Here is how EXW, FOB and DDP actually behave when the cargo is custom dice, and how we run deliveries from our floor in Chang'an, Dongguan so the cost you budget is the cost you pay.

What an incoterm actually decides

Incoterms are standardised trade terms published by the International Chamber of Commerce, and behind each three-letter code sit four practical questions: who arranges and pays for the international freight, who handles export clearance in China, who handles import clearance and duty in your country, and — the one everybody forgets — at which point the risk of loss or damage transfers from the factory to you.

For dice the stakes are particular. Dice cartons are small but dense: a master carton of zinc-alloy metal sets weighs several times what the same carton of acrylic does, which changes how couriers and forwarders price it. Order values are often modest compared with the paperwork a border crossing involves, so a fixed clearance fee that would be a rounding error on a container of furniture can be a real percentage of a 300-set dice run. And many dice buyers — Kickstarter creators, game publishers, small brands — are not professional importers with a customs broker on speed dial.

The practical rule that follows: never compare quotes across suppliers unless the incoterm and the destination match. A factory quoting EXW will always look cheaper on paper than one quoting DDP, because the first number is missing the entire journey. The comparison only becomes honest when both prices describe the same door.

EXW: the factory-gate price

EXW — ex works — is the shortest handover in trade. We manufacture your dice, pass them through QC, pack them, and our responsibility ends at the factory gate. Your forwarder collects the cartons, handles export clearance out of China, books the freight, clears your border and delivers the last mile. Every cost after the gate, and every risk after the gate, is yours.

EXW makes sense in exactly one situation: you already have a freight relationship you trust, usually because you are consolidating goods from several Chinese suppliers — dice from us, miniatures from one factory, boxes from another — into a single container. Then EXW gives your forwarder full control and avoids paying for the same legs twice.

For everyone else it is usually a false economy. The sticker price is the lowest of the three terms, but origin-side charges, export documentation and the coordination burden all move onto your side of the table — and if anything goes wrong between Dongguan and your door, it is your problem in a timezone you don't work in.

FOB: the forwarder's favourite

FOB — free on board — splits the journey at the port. We truck your cartons to the port, complete Chinese export clearance and load the goods onto the vessel; from the moment they cross the ship's rail, cost and risk are yours. Your freight forwarder handles the ocean leg, destination clearance, duty and delivery.

This is the classic term for experienced importers moving real volume by sea, and it earns its popularity: you choose the carrier, you can consolidate, and destination costs are negotiated by someone working for you. If you are ordering pallet-scale quantities on a regular cycle, FOB with a good forwarder is often the most economical structure over a year of shipments.

Two things to check before you choose it. First, ask your forwarder for the all-in destination cost — deconsolidation, terminal handling, documentation and delivery fees are where "cheap" ocean quotes hide their margin. Second, remember FOB is by definition a sea term; when a courier shipment is described as FOB, what is usually meant is simply "you pay the freight", so pin down exactly which charges are included before comparing numbers.

DDP: one price to your door

DDP — delivered duty paid — is the whole journey in one number. We book the freight, export the goods, clear your border, pay the duty and tax, and the cartons arrive at your door or your fulfilment hub with nothing further to pay. Most of our clients choose DDP door-to-door, and the reason is less about price than about predictability: the number on the invoice is the landed cost, full stop.

It is the natural fit for dice buyers specifically. A creator shipping a funded campaign does not want to become an importer of record for one delivery. A game café ordering branded sets has no customs broker. Even experienced publishers often take DDP for smaller express runs simply because the coordination cost of doing it themselves exceeds the saving.

The best incoterm is the one where every step is handled by whoever does it weekly. We ship dice every week; most first-time creators have never cleared a customs entry in their life. That's why DDP wins.— Queenie, YSDICE project manager

Question	EXW	FOB	DDP
Who books international freight	You / your forwarder	You / your forwarder	YSDICE
Export clearance in China	You	YSDICE	YSDICE
Import duty & taxes	You	You	Included
Risk passes to you	Factory gate	On board the vessel	At your door
Best suited to	Multi-supplier consolidation	Pallet-scale sea importers	Most dice orders

Express or sea: choosing the lane

The incoterm decides who pays; the lane decides how fast. For samples and small runs, express courier — DHL, FedEx or UPS — delivers in 3–7 days and is priced per kilogram. For volume, sea freight takes 25–35 days and is priced by pallet and cubic metre, which is where the economics flip: on a large run, ocean freight per set falls to a fraction of the courier rate.

Material changes the maths. Couriers charge on whichever is greater, actual weight or dimensional weight. Metal dice are so dense that actual weight always governs — which is why big metal runs belong on the water. Acrylic and resin sets are far lighter per carton, so mid-sized orders of those can stay economical by air for longer before sea takes over.

Plan the calendar backwards from your delivery promise. Mass production runs 10–30 days depending on material; add 3–7 days by express or 25–35 by sea, plus a buffer for clearance and inland delivery on non-DDP terms. On that arithmetic, a sea-freighted resin campaign needs its balance paid and cartons dispatched roughly two months before backers expect a parcel.

Shipping straight to fulfilment hubs

Crowdfunded projects rarely ship to the creator's garage anymore. The standard pattern is to split the run across regional fulfilment hubs — one consignment for North America, one for the EU, one for the UK, sometimes Australia — so each backer's parcel ships domestically and nobody's reward eats a surprise VAT bill at their door.

We deliver directly to Kickstarter fulfilment hubs, and the detail that matters is doing it on DDP terms: the hub receives cleared, duty-paid cartons and simply books them in. Hubs are warehouses, not importers — a consignment arriving with unpaid duty sits in limbo while everyone argues about whose credit card clears it.

The second detail is inbound compliance. Every hub publishes receiving rules — carton weight limits, label formats, advance shipment notices, packing lists per consignment. Send us your hub's inbound requirements when you confirm the order and the cartons are labelled to spec on the line, not relabelled in a warehouse at your expense.

Paperwork, payment and proof

The commercial rhythm is simple: 50% deposit to schedule production, balance before shipment. We accept T/T bank transfer, PayPal, Alipay/WeChat and Alibaba Trade Assurance — the last being worth knowing for first orders, since it puts a third party's escrow between your payment and our performance.

Before that balance is ever due, you see proof. Every order goes through a two-stage inspection — once at the workshop that made them, once again before dispatch — with a photo report, so you inspect the actual dice — faces, numerals, packaging — before the cartons seal. On the compliance side we hold SGS material reports and EN71 / ASTM toy-safety testing, documents that matter twice: once for your retailers, and once at borders where officials ask what these little polyhedrons are made of. Dispatch itself is the part we are measured on — at or above 99% on time.

One more thing that belongs under paperwork: your designs. Client molds and artwork are never resold or reused for other buyers, and we sign NDAs on request — the shipment leaving on time matters little if the design leaks along the way.

The quote that ends surprises

Every shipping surprise is a question that wasn't asked at quoting time. So ask them all at once: quote me in the incoterm I'll actually use, to my actual postcode or hub address, with express and sea both priced, and tell me the production time for my material so I can see the whole calendar on one page. A factory that ships every week can answer that in one reply — and once the answer is in writing, there is nothing left for the border to surprise you with.

How dice cartons are packed to survive

Freight terms decide who pays for the journey; packing decides what condition the goods arrive in, and dice are a deceptively demanding cargo. A retail DND dice set is a hard, dense object sitting inside a presentation box that must arrive looking untouched — the customer is buying the unboxing as much as the dice. So the packing hierarchy runs in layers: each set in its retail box or pouch, sets in inner boxes of five or ten, inner boxes in double-walled master cartons, and the master cartons kept deliberately small. Every carton that leaves the YSDICE floor is weighed and measured before booking, because a carton a courier can comfortably throw — and they do throw — travels better than a heavy one a courier has to drag.

Metal changes the rules again. Zinc-alloy sets are heavy enough that a full-size carton would exceed courier weight caps and crush its own bottom layer, so metal runs pack into smaller cartons with foam interleaving between rows — the enamel and plating on a metal d20 should never spend three weeks at sea grinding against its neighbour. Resin and sharp-edge sets get the opposite treatment: their weight is trivial but their corners are the product, so the insert holds each die apart from the next and the cartons are cushioned against shock rather than abrasion. Sea shipments in humid months also carry desiccant in every master carton; a container crossing the equator is a weather system in a steel box, and paper packaging will drink any moisture it is offered.

All of this is decided before production ends, not at the loading dock. When you confirm an order we confirm the carton plan with it — how many sets per carton, gross weight per carton, and how the numbers line up against your courier's caps or your hub's receiving limits. It is a five-minute conversation that prevents the two classic arrival photos: crushed corners and rattled boxes.

Seasons, holidays and the freight calendar

Freight has weather, and it is remarkably predictable. From late September through November, capacity out of South China tightens as the whole consumer-goods world ships for Christmas: express rates rise, sea bookings need more lead time, and a shipment that would fly out in two days in May can queue for a week in October. Then comes the hard stop that surprises every first-time importer: Chinese New Year, usually in late January or February, when factories across Guangdong — ours included — close for two to three weeks and the fortnight before the holiday becomes the busiest dispatch window of the year.

The planning consequences are concrete. A Q4 retail launch should have its balance paid and cartons on the water by early autumn, not mid-November. A Kickstarter promising March delivery must have production finished before the new year shutdown, or accept that the clock only restarts when the lines do. Every carton in this guide leaves the same loading bay in Chang'an, Dongguan, where YSDICE operates as also known as Dongguan Yushun Hardware Co., Ltd. — and after eight years of those seasonal rhythms we quote holiday-adjacent timelines with the shutdown already built in, rather than letting a buyer discover it from a silent tracking page.

The reverse seasons are worth knowing too. Late winter through early summer is the calm water of the freight year: rates soften, sea schedules run closer to book, and it is the ideal window for the unglamorous work — tooling a new mold in 20–25 days, sampling in 3–5, and building inventory before the autumn squeeze arrives on schedule.

Shipping mistakes we help buyers avoid

Most shipping disasters are not bad luck; they are one unexamined assumption meeting a border. The most expensive assumption is comparing an EXW price against a DDP price and concluding the EXW factory is cheaper — we open this guide with it because we still see it weekly. The second is under-declaring value to shave duty. It reads as a saving until a customs officer opens a carton of obviously premium metal dice declared at a fraction of their worth; the resulting inspection, reassessment and penalty cost far more than the duty ever would, and the shipment sits still the entire time. We declare honestly and put the real compliance file — SGS material reports, EN71 / ASTM results — behind the declaration, which is precisely why our cartons tend to move through borders without conversation.

Third: booking freight before the inspection report. The inspection photo report exists so you approve the actual goods before the balance is paid and the cartons seal; a buyer who books their own forwarder for a pickup date before seeing the report has removed their own safety margin. Fourth: forgetting the last metre. A DDP consignment to a residential address can still fail at delivery if nobody is home to sign for 40 cartons; a hub consignment can still be refused if the advance shipment notice was never filed. Tell us what the destination actually is — a garage, a 3PL, an Amazon FC — and the labelling, palletising and paperwork follow that reality. And fifth: treating the tracking number as the plan. Tracking tells you where the cartons are; a named person tells you what happens next. Queenie answers within hours precisely because a shipment with a human attached rarely becomes a horror story.

Shipping FAQ from the weekly inbox

Who is the importer of record on DDP? Practically, the responsibility sits on our side of the table: the freight partner clears your border and duties are paid before delivery, which is exactly why hubs and first-time creators prefer the term. You receive delivered cartons, not a customs entry to manage.

Can I split one order across destinations? Yes — splitting a run across a US hub, an EU hub and a UK hub is the standard crowdfunding pattern, and each consignment gets its own packing list and labels on the line. Mixed-lane splits are common too: a few cartons by express for review copies and launch-day retail, the bulk by sea behind them.

Is shipping insured? Sea consignments can be insured for a small percentage of value, and for express the carrier's liability plus our packing standard covers the realistic risks. For high-value metal or gemstone runs we will recommend insurance rather than wait to be asked.

What if cartons arrive damaged? Photograph everything before opening further, note it with the driver where possible, and send the photos to us the same day. Because every order ships with its AQL photo report, we can show what left the factory — which makes carrier claims fast instead of arguable — and Dongguan Yushun Hardware Co., Ltd. stands behind what the report shows.

How far ahead should I book? For express, dispatch is booked when the balance clears — days, not weeks. For sea, tell us your target delivery date at order confirmation and we plan production backwards from the sailing, with the 25–35 day ocean window and your country's clearance rhythm included. The order you place with a calendar attached is the order that never feels late.