Before You Accept DDP: The Importer Questions to Settle First

Answer first: the questions to raise before you accept the wording

Wording that appears to place arrival, clearance and final delivery on one side of the deal is easy to skim past on pricing day and expensive to unpick later. Before you accept delivery-completes-at-destination wording, raise these questions and get every answer written into the contract or order confirmation rather than left in email:

• Who is named to act as importer of record at the destination? Not who pays in the abstract, but which legal person files the entry where the goods arrive.
• Who takes physical delivery, and at exactly which place? A named port, a city and a consignee address are three different answers.
• Which side supplies each document and data element needed for clearance? Classification input, valuation input, origin input, consignee identifiers: name them one by one.
• Who carries cost incurred after arrival that is not carriage to the named place? Storage, handling, re-delivery after a failed attempt, and onward carriage past the named place.
• What happens if clearance stalls because one side's information is missing? Write a notification step and a time-boxed escalation path.
• Does the payment clause match the delivery clause? The delivery wording and your payment obligation sit in different places in the contract; one does not prove the other.
• Who reviews the wording before signature? Name the reviewer on your side and keep the signed version with the order file.

Notice what none of these questions do: they do not answer who wins a dispute. Allocation questions that turn on law belong to qualified counsel or a licensed customs broker. What this checklist gives you is something more basic and more useful before that point — a record of which questions were asked, who answered them, and what remains open when you sign.

Why the named place matters more than the label

The rules behind these labels allocate delivery, carriage, risk and cost under the specific rule and the named place, per the ICC Incoterms 2020 rules. In practice that means the abbreviation alone settles very little: the same three letters behave differently depending on where you say delivery happens.

Ask the party proposing the wording to write out, in words, which rule and which named place they mean, and which edition of the rules the contract refers to. If the place is missing, vague, or stated only as a country, treat the clause as unfinished rather than generous. A term that reads attractively on a quotation line often reads very differently once the place is spelled out.

What this wording does not settle

• Not supplier capability or output. The Incoterms allocate delivery, carriage, risk and cost; they do not validate supplier capability or product quality (ICC Incoterms 2020 rules). The shortest possible route to disappointment is reading a smooth delivery term as evidence that the other party can make the goods.
• Not quality proof or payment proof. A delivery term is not a quality certificate and not evidence of payment terms. Inspection clauses and payment clauses carry those jobs, and they must be read separately.
• Not a certificate of anything on your side. A completed worksheet is a screening record inside your own process: not certification, not supplier approval, not acceptance of goods.
• Not legal, customs or regulatory advice. Everything here is editorial housekeeping for organizing a purchase file.

Blank worksheet: importer questions before accepting the wording

Copy these tables into your own file and leave the cells empty until someone commits each answer in writing. Leaving a row blank is a real result: it tells you what you agreed to without knowing.

A. Parties and named place

Item to confirm	What must be written down	Owner to confirm with	Evidence on file	Status
Importer of record at destination
Party taking physical delivery
Named place, written in full
Rule label and edition referenced in the contract

B. Clearance responsibility

Item to confirm	What must be written down	Owner to confirm with	Evidence on file	Status
Who files the entry
Who supplies classification and valuation input
Who receives official requests for further information
Escalation contact on each side

C. Cost boundaries beyond carriage to the named place

Item to confirm	What must be written down	Owner to confirm with	Evidence on file	Status
Storage and handling after arrival
Re-delivery after a failed attempt
Onward carriage beyond the named place
Time-based charges such as demurrage or detention

D. Documents and data handoff

Document or data element	Who supplies it	Who receives it	Format	When it must arrive
Classification input
Valuation input
Origin evidence input
Consignee identifiers
Transport document
Contact for official requests

E. Stall and escalation record

Step	Trigger	Who is notified	Time allowed	Backup action
First notification
Second escalation
Decision to hold shipment

The handoff record to keep afterward

Suggested fields for the file you hand to whoever signs next: order or quotation reference; date of the review; who reviewed it and who approved it; the exact delivery wording, pasted verbatim rather than paraphrased; the named person who confirmed each owner; open questions left unresolved at signature; where the signed version is stored; and which sections must be re-checked if the destination, consignee or routing changes. Our suggestion is to re-open the whole worksheet on any routing change, because every row in block A depends on the named place — but that is workflow advice, not a legal requirement.

Next action

Take the exact quotation and order confirmation you hold, fill worksheet blocks A through D, and mark unanswered rows. Keep the delivery clause beside that worksheet. The on-site Sourcing Desk tool does not send a brief or decide import responsibility; confirm the allocation with the contracting parties and qualified advisers where needed.