What you can do with your Verified Account

Duty must be prepaid on U.S.-bound postal shipments under $2,500 USD. Here is how that works with Royal Mail:

1. You ship your parcel through Royal Mail.
2. Royal Mail collects the duty. Business account holders are invoiced after Royal Mail pays it upfront, and personal senders pay at postage purchase.
3. Zonos brokers the shipment, since postal shipments at or under $2,500 USD have to be entered by a licensed U.S. customs broker.
4. Zonos remits the duty directly to CBP, then invoices Royal Mail for what it remitted.

How to create Royal Mail labels with a Verified Account 

Print your labels from wherever you normally print your Royal Mail labels.

If you uploaded your products with a CSV, include a reference to each product inside when you ship a U.S.-bound parcel with Royal Mail, so Zonos can match it to your Catalogue. That match is how Zonos attaches the additional product information in your Catalogue to the shipment. Details on how to add the reference are coming soon.

If you connected your store with Zonos Sync, there is nothing to add. Zonos matches your shipments to your products using the orders and tracking numbers from your store.

Your Verified Account gives you free access to Zonos Dashboard Lite, which includes tools to help you calculate duties on your products. With these calculations, you can build the true cost of cross-border shipping into your product or shipping price—so there are no surprises for you or your customers.

Item Quoter 

Limit: 5,000 quotes per month.

Item Quoter is your quick tariff calculator for individual products. Useful for building duty costs into your product pricing before shipping with Royal Mail.

How to calculate duty rates 

1. Go to Dashboard → Item Quoter.
2. Add your item price and currency.
3. Add your made-in country (where your item was manufactured).
4. Select destination country (limited to the U.S. in Dashboard Lite).
5. Enter your item description.
6. Click Get result.

Review the returned duty rates for the postal service. You can use this calculation to know how much to buffer product prices or shipping prices to cover duty cost.

Best practices for accurate duty rates 

• Accurate descriptions: Use "sterling silver ring with gemstone" instead of "jewelry".
• Country of origin: Where the product was made, not your business location.
• Pricing strategy: Add calculated duties to product pricing to ensure profitable DDP shipping.

Need just an HS code? Enter item description only. No price or country of origin required for classification-only lookups.

See the Item Quoter guide for the full walkthrough.

Your Verified Account gives you access to Dashboard Lite, which includes tools to classify your products with HTS codes. HTS codes are required when shipping internationally to the U.S. and tell customs what kinds of products are in the packages entering the U.S.

Item Quoter 

Item Quoter is your quick tariff classification tool for individual products.

Limit: 5,000 quotes per month.

How to get an HTS code classification 

1. Go to Dashboard → Item Quoter.
2. Enter your item description (use detailed descriptions to improve accuracy).
3. Select destination country (United States).
4. Click Get result.

U.S. entry now asks for more than a description and a value on certain goods. Your Verified Account is where you find out which of your products are affected, and where the answers live once you have them.

1. Get your products into Zonos. Connect your store with Zonos Sync, or upload a CSV. Either way, Zonos then knows what you sell.
2. Review what needs attention. Zonos checks every product against U.S. entry requirements and flags the ones missing details for your review—melt and pour data for a steel water bottle, FDA details for a lip gloss.
3. Answer the questions. Zonos Clarify works out what each flagged product has to provide and drafts the likely answer from the product information you already have, so you review and confirm rather than start from a blank form.
4. Upload the supporting documents. Certificates of origin, metal origin records, and trade agreement paperwork attach to the products they cover.

Everything you provide is saved to the product and reused, so you answer once rather than per shipment.

See Add required product data for the full walkthrough.

Some of the information your Verified Account holds reduces what a shipment owes, rather than just keeping it moving.

• Free trade agreements. Postal shipments under $2,500 USD can claim a preferential rate for the first time. Supported agreements are USMCA, U.S.–Australia, U.S.–Korea, and U.S.–Israel. A claim needs a valid certificate of origin with the shipment, so store the certificate against your products and it travels with every parcel it covers.
• Section 232 metal origin. Steel and aluminum articles are charged on where the metal was originally made—the country of melt and pour for steel, smelt and cast for aluminum. Declaring it does not by itself lower the rate: metal made in Russia is charged 200% either way. What it does is let the rate that actually applies be used, because without that origin the highest default rate is charged even when the article qualifies for less.

Both depend on data you would be adding anyway, so supplying it early is worth doing.