Quoting · Incoterms 2020
What to ask for by Incoterm before quoting
· 8 min read · Flettia team
Asking for too much delays the quote; asking for too little forces a re-quote. What separates the two is the Incoterm: it defines who pays each leg and therefore which legs the forwarder quotes and what information is needed to quote them. Here is the practical checklist, keeping import and export apart, which is where most confusion starts.
First: import and export invert everything
On import, your customer is the buyer and you arrange what the seller doesn't cover. On export, your customer is the seller and you quote what they must deliver. The same Incoterm means opposite legs depending on direction: on a CIF import the supplier already paid freight and insurance, so your quote starts at the destination port; on a CIF export your customer must pay freight and insurance, so you do quote them. Reading one branch with the other's rule gives the opposite conclusion.
EXW · Ex Works
- Origin: the seller's warehouse. The longest quote on import: pickup, origin charges, export clearance (on the buyer), international freight and destination.
- Blocking data: exact pickup address (city is not enough), cargo type and quantity, commodity, destination.
- Assumed and declared: weight for a full container, estimated availability date.
- At a forwarder we work with, 99.9% of EXW quotes had a warehouse as origin and 77% had origin charges quoted: the Incoterm, not the mode, decides the type of origin point.
FCA · Free Carrier
- The seller delivers at the agreed point. The typical ambiguity: the seller's warehouse or the carrier's terminal? It changes whether there are origin charges or not.
- Blocking data: the exact delivery point. It is one of the three exceptions where it pays to ask before quoting.
FAS and FOB · Alongside and on board
- Ocean only. Origin: the port of loading. On import your quote covers international freight and destination; there are no origin charges (99.9% of FOB quotes at the reference forwarder started at a port and 88.7% had no origin charges).
- Blocking data: origin port, destination, container type and count, commodity.
- Assumed and declared: the city's natural port when the customer names the city, the reference date.
- On export, FOB is the reverse: origin charges are the whole quote; freight and destination are zero.
CFR, CIF (ocean) and CPT, CIP (any mode)
- On import: the supplier already paid freight to destination (and insurance under CIF and CIP). Your quote covers destination: discharge, local charges, customs, delivery. Charging insurance again on a CIF import is double billing.
- On export: your customer is the seller and must pay freight (and insurance under CIF/CIP): you quote them, and leaving insurance out puts your customer in breach of their contract.
- At the reference forwarder, CIF, CFR, CPT and CIP hardly appear on import and live on export: on import, EXW + FOB + FCA were 99.9% of 11,630 quotes.
DAP, DPU and DDP · Group D
- The seller delivers at destination. On export it is the complete, highest-value operation and depends on the correspondent network at destination. On import there is almost nothing to quote.
- Mode changes nothing in group D: there is no separate freight to quote.
- DDP requires pre-calculating duties and taxes at destination. Without a connected tariff source, a person always reviews it: it is the exception that is never automated.
What is never assumed and what is never asked
- Never assumed: dimensions for loose cargo (LCL or air). In 522 loose-cargo quotes at the reference forwarder, none omitted them: it is the one field the operation itself already treats as mandatory.
- Never asked: what is already in the customer master (tax ID, usual address), and the natural port or airport when the customer names the city.
- Doesn't exist: an ocean Incoterm (FAS, FOB, CFR, CIF) on an air or road request. Those eight combinations are not quoted; they are corrected with the customer.
The four levels Vera uses
Flettia's quoting employee applies this same checklist with four levels per field: blocks (no quote without it: asked in a single message), assumed and declared (there is a usual value backed by the operation: used and written down), if applicable (stops being assumed under a condition: then it is asked), and never asked (resolved on its own). The result is that it asks less than a person and leaves more of a trail than a person.
Frequently asked questions
Why not always ask for all the data?
Because it delays the quote and the customer is quoting with other forwarders at the same time. Data the Incoterm doesn't require is assumed with the usual value and declared; blocking data is asked once.
What about destination services (insurance, customs, warehousing)?
The Incoterm defines who pays each leg only on the origin side. Destination services are the customer's choice and are quoted separately from freight.
Does this change by country?
The skeleton (what each Incoterm requires) is a published ICC rule and is reused in any country. What gets rebuilt per country is the catalogue of destination charges and surcharges.
See the matrix applied to one of your requests
Bring a real RFQ and we show you what the quoting employee assumes, asks and quotes under your rules.