Item classification
Gain a better understanding of how the item classification service works and how you can use it to sell your products across international borders
Digital River's item classification service takes the information you give us about your products and then, for each country they're sold into, identifies their tariff codes.
On this page, you'll find information on:
Classifying items in checkouts
To trigger a call to the item classification service at checkout time, you first need to make sure your Digital River representative has enabled the landed cost feature. Additionally, you must configure your checkout or checkout-session so that:
shipFrom.address.country(oritems[].shipFrom.address.country) andshipTo.address.countryare assigned different values.
Not all transactions that involve shipping goods from one country and into another invoke a call to item classification. In some cases, due to trade agreements that exist between nations, products in international shipments don't require tariff codes. For details, refer to Cross border.
There's at least one physical
items[], each of which must have adescriptionthat has a maximum length of 4000 characters, and askuGroupIdthat's either sent inproductDetailsor stored in the SKU referenced byskuId.Each of these
items[]must also have one or more product taxonomies. Depending on how you send us your product data, you can build these classification schemes by definingitemBreadcrumborcategories. For details, refer to:shippingChoice.shippingTermsis either omitted, undefined, or assigned a value ofDDP.
If the goods are shipping cross-border and (1) description and/or (2) itemBreadcrumb / categories are missing, then a request to create or update either of these API resources returns the following error:
We highly recommend that your SKUs and productDetails also have a url, image , and countryOfOrigin. Defining these parameters gives the classification service more data to work with when trying to determine a product's tariff codes.
In general, sending detailed, high-quality data in the request increases the probability that the service returns tariff codes which match the values assigned to your products by each importation country.
It's important that these predicted and actual tariff codes are the same. If they're not, then customers might be assessed too much or too little import taxes and duties at checkout. Incorrectly classified products can also result in non-compliance penalties, delays at the border, and even, in extreme cases, seizure of the goods or the revoking of import privileges.
Accessing a product's tariff codes
In checkouts, each applicable items[] is assigned a tariffCode which, once the order is successfully created, gets passed to that resource as well.
If you select either low-code checkout option , you can find the checkoutId in the event with a type of checkout_session.order.created.
The first time a product is sold into an country, it can take 24-48 hours before its successfully classified. As a result, items[].tariffCode might initially be assigned a default, harmonized value until its full, country-specific code is determined and added to subsequent checkouts and orders.
To determine the status of a product classification request, you'll need to look at tariffRecord.tariffCodes[] in the SKUs resource. Alternatively, you can get this information on the SKU details page in the Digital River Dashboard.
If you pass productDetails at checkout-time, Digital River creates a SKU to represent that object.
Each element of a SKU's tariffCodes[] contains a status, whose possible values are PENDING, CLASSIFIED, and CANNOT_BE_CLASSIFIED. If status is CLASSIFIED, then the element also contains a code that is specific to that importation country.
In the following SKU, the list of tariffCodes[] has been shortened for demonstration purposes.
In the unlikely event that a tarriffCodes[] has a status of CANNOT_BE_CLASSIFIED, work with your Digital River representative to resolve the issue.
Over time, as more of your products are shipped into an increasing number of countries, the service has methods to expedite the classification process and make each items[].tariffCode that's assigned to a order more precise.
For example, even if one of your products has never been sold into an individual country, we might already know its country-specific tariffCodes[].code. This is because certain groups of nations, such as those in the European Union, have trade agreements in place that standardize these values among their members.
So, to take one example, if your product sells into Germany, we might not know the full code assigned to it by that country. But once the classification service makes a determination and status moves to CLASSIFIED, we create a tariffCodes[] for each country participating in the EU system and assign the same code to each. This means that, in the future, when customers in any of these nations purchase that product, we'll already have the value we need.
Additionally, once a SKU has been assigned even just a single country-specific code, we can extract the first six digits of that value, which is universal among all nations, and store it in the SKU's tariffRecord.hsCode. That value can then be assigned to items[].tariffCodes in future orders shipping to countries for which we don't yet have a full code.
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