Shipping a painting across a border involves more than a freight price. There’s the crate, transit insurance, customs duty, import VAT and sometimes specialist handling. Galleries and advisors want the total before they agree a sale, not after.
ArtCarli has had a shipping calculator for a while. This summer we rebuilt it, and most of what we changed came from noticing where it was quietly misleading people.
1. Estimated prices look exactly like real ones
The first version modelled some prices, estimating what a service would probably cost. On screen those numbers looked just as confident as a real quote.
We removed modelled pricing entirely. Every freight price in the calculator now comes from a live carrier quote. If we can’t get a real price, we’d rather say so than show a guess dressed up as one.
2. People compare arrival dates, not service names
Carriers name their services in ways that mean a lot to logistics people and very little to a gallery. What the gallery actually wants to know is when the work arrives and what that costs.
So quotes are now grouped by delivery date, using the carrier’s own availability data rather than a typical transit time. One detail surprised us: the carrier only returned delivery dates for our routes once we sent the customs value in US dollars, so we convert it before asking.
3. Show the landed cost, not freight with a tax badge next to it
We used to show the freight price large and the taxes in a small chip beside it. People read the big number. Now every quote shows the landed cost, with freight, crating, insurance, duty and import VAT added together.
Import VAT on art is its own small rabbit hole. In the UK, many imported works of art qualify for a reduced rate, but not everything that looks like art counts. Rather than assume, the calculator shows the factors that decide it.
4. Say plainly what a price doesn’t cover
A carrier’s price comes with limited liability for loss or damage. That isn’t insurance for a painting worth tens of thousands of pounds, and it’s easy to assume otherwise. The calculator now says so in plain words next to the quote, and offers the carrier’s own additional cover where it exists.
5. Know when to hand over to a person
For valuable works, a standard courier is often the wrong answer. They may need a fine-art shipper, climate control or someone travelling with them. So above £10,000 the calculator stops pretending and offers a specialist shipping enquiry instead.
What we’d tell anyone building something similar
The integration was the smaller part of the job. The bigger part was deciding what each number on screen is allowed to imply. A calculator that’s right most of the time and doesn’t tell you when it isn’t is worse than one that shows fewer numbers, honestly.