Zonos works with CBP to power transparent, secure trade

Historically, origin posts have not handled duties. When the United States required postal shippers to prepay duties upfront, the global postal network had to adapt fast.

Zonos developed Prepay, a mobile app that gives postal clerks and individual shippers everything they need to comply, instantly.

• Upfront duty calculation and collection in-app
• Automatically-generated valid, coherent HS codes (needed to calculate duty)
• Clear customs descriptions auto-generated for each item based on photos of what is being sent

Rather than having to train every individual shipper on how to find accurate HS codes and what kinds of details to always include when shipping internationally (things like: what the item is made of, it's purpose, and who it is intended for), Prepay automatically handles this in seconds.

The result: CBP gets richer visibility into what’s entering the country, helping secure borders, plus compliance with upfront duty collection. For postal operators and shippers, Prepay handles duty calculation and collection, gives customers transparency at the counter, and prevents clearance delays by ensuring packages are compliant before they leave the country.

A mobile app works well at the retail counter, but businesses who ship many packages a day need a solution that won't slow down their operations. Zonos Verified Accounts is that solution.

Zonos Verified Accounts connect to a shipper's business account with the post. Anytime they ship items to the U.S. with their postal account, the post sends the shipment data to Zonos. Zonos calculates the duties, invoices the shipper for the associated cost, and sends advance data to CBP about what is coming into the country (along with confirmation that duties were paid).

The result: International brands can continue shipping to the U.S. without disruption, U.S. postal recipients don't have any surprise fees during delivery, and CBP gets advance data on what is coming into the country.

Building collection tools wasn’t enough.

To address the operational challenges making prepaid duty collection at origin seem infeasible, Zonos created the Universal DDP Label Architecture—a framework with clear duty-paid markers to help posts stop non-compliant shipments before shipping them to the U.S.

Every shipment includes a Declaration ID, confirming that duties were collected before it leaves the country. This prevents packages from being shipped to the U.S. only to be returned to the sender for non-compliance (unpaid duties).

Merchants, shipping platforms, postal operators, and even postal associations can connect through the Universal DDP Label Architecture to solve operational challenges in a way that’s understood across the entire network.

For many shipments, country of origin (COO) is unclear. The result? Incomplete or incorrect customs data.

Zonos validates country of origin using a combination of AI, proprietary data, and probability scoring. It considers the product name, description, materials, category, classification, brand, and even the product image. CBP has access to this validation to flag suspicious shipments for further review.

Zonos doesn't just validate country of origin, it can also predict it. Using the same AI model, Zonos can infer the most likely country of origin for products without a known COO (helpful for secondhand marketplaces and other scenarios where the manufacturer is truly unknown).

A common method used to evade duties is the underdeclaration of shipment value—a practice that is both illegal and difficult to detect. This creates a challenge for CBP in accurately identifying noncompliance and assessing the correct duties owed.

Zonos’ API detects undervalued shipments using an AI-driven statistical model. By analyzing product attributes, it predicts a realistic price distribution (range) for each item and applies statistical tests to determine whether the declared value is consistent with market norms or not.

The result: CBP gains fast, data-driven insight into shipments likely to be undervalued, enabling them to identify patterns of noncompliance and target enforcement more effectively.

Zonos Classify is a patent-pending AI classification tool that provides accurate HS codes through a state-of-the-art proprietary multimodal AI system. It is trained with billions of tokens and millions of classified goods examples over many years.

Zonos' robust API does more than provide accurate, country-specific HS codes. It also includes:

• AI image classification
• Confidence scoring
• Alternate HS codes
• Validation and coherency checks
• AI customs descriptions
• Duty rates
• Classify boost (AI-powered data augmentation)
• Audit trails (justification for the classification)
• Language support (50 languages, including non-latin characters)

Zonos' intelligence portal is a no-code solution to access advance shipment data and insights. Without needing any government development, CBP can access shipment data prior to arrival in the U.S., including data fields not previously available to them.

Aggregating this advance shipment data also allows CBP to audit items in shipments with Zonos insights such as product value undervaluations and coherency between item descriptions and HS codes.