Importers negotiate hard on the supplier's price and accept whatever duty arrives. The heading is usually the larger number and it is arguable.
Every item that crosses a border is classified under a heading in the tariff, and the duty rate follows the heading rather than the item. That sentence is the whole of this article and almost nobody outside the trade acts on it.
What this means in practice is that similar looking goods can attract quite different rates, depending on what they are made of, what they are for, and how the supplier chose to describe them. A textile item can sit under two headings depending on fibre content. A machine can be classified by its function or by the vehicle it is mounted on. A food product can turn on whether an ingredient is above or below a proportion. None of this is an accident or a loophole: it is how a tariff works everywhere in the world.
Three consequences worth acting on.
The first is that the description on your supplier's invoice is doing work you may not want it to do. A line reading plastic articles will be classified by somebody other than you. A line that says what the item is, what it is made of and what it is used for gets classified the way you intend. Ask your supplier to write that, and where they will not, ask them for a technical sheet.
The second is that the heading is worth deciding before you choose a supplier. We have priced the duty on two quotations for the same kind of machine and found a difference large enough to reverse which supplier was cheaper. The importer had negotiated for a fortnight on the goods price and had not spent an hour on the heading, which was the bigger number.
The third is that a heading can be argued, and it is argued with documents rather than with opinions. Last year we had a concrete pump challenged as a vehicle. What settled it at the lower rate was a bundle: the manufacturer's technical description, the type approval, a parts breakdown showing where the value sat, and two foreign customs rulings on the same model. Eight working days, and the case was won in the assembling rather than in any meeting.
One caution. Choosing a heading because it is cheaper, rather than because it is correct, is not classification, and it is found on audit years later when the same goods have been imported eleven times. Every heading we file goes on the file with the reasoning beside it, so that the answer three years later is a document rather than somebody's memory.
If you import the same product line repeatedly, spend an hour on it once. It is the cheapest hour in the whole import.
