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At Consolidated Shipping Line, Inc. Canada we offer our clients freight consultancy and professional and frank opinions.

The combined knowledge and experience of our staff and available resources is designed to get the job done right the first time.

Incoterms or international commerce terms are a series of international sales terms that are widely used throughout the world. They are used to divide transaction costs and responsibilities between buyer and seller and reflect state of the art transportation practices.

Incoterms deal with the questions related to the delivery of the products from the seller to the buyer. This includes the carriage of products, export and import clearance responsibilities, who pays for what, and who has risk for the condition of the products at different locations within the transport process. Incoterms are always used with a geographical location and do not deal with transfer of title.

The Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (HS) of tariff nomenclature is an internationally standardized system of names and numbers for classifying traded products developed and maintained by the World Customs Organization (WCO).

The HS is a six-digit nomenclature. Individual countries have extended it to ten digits for customs purposes, and to 8 digits for export purposes. Countries representing about 98% of world trade, use the HS as a basis for:

• Customs tariffs
• Collection of international trade statistics
• Rules of origin
• Collection of internal taxes
• Trade negotiations
• Transport tariffs and statistics
• Monitoring of controlled goods
• Areas of Customs controls and procedures, including risk assessment, IT and compliance.

Codes have been revised through the years. So if you need to reference a code related to a trade issue from even a few years ago, make sure the definition set that you're using matches the code.