DDP (Delivered Duty Paid)

DDP moves the delivery point to the far end of the journey and keeps cost and risk together for nearly all of it. Unlike the port-based rules where the seller pays for carriage but the buyer is on risk, here the two dials stay aligned: the seller pays and the seller bears the risk, right up to delivery at the named place.

Cost

The seller bears costs to the named destination place, including carriage, export clearance, import clearance, and the duties and charges payable on import.

Risk

Stays with the seller until the goods are delivered at the named place. A loss in transit or at the border is the seller’s.

Carriage

The seller contracts the whole chain to the named place. The buyer takes no part in arranging it.

Insurance

No insurance obligation runs between the parties under this rule. A seller bearing risk to destination insures for its own account if it chooses to.

Export and import formalities

Both are the seller’s. This is what separates the rule from every other delivered term in the set.

Import clearance is normally performed by, or in the name of, an importer of record — a party with standing in the importing jurisdiction: registered, identifiable, and accountable for the declaration. Under DDP the term places that obligation on the seller, who is by definition located elsewhere. Whether a foreign seller can be an importer of record at all is a question of the importing country’s law, and the answer is not the same everywhere.

Where it is possible, it is often conditional — on registration, on a tax identity, on appointing a local representative, or on an established presence. Indirect taxes add a second layer: import charges paid by a party that is not established locally may not be recoverable in the way they would be for a domestic importer, which turns a procedural obstacle into a cost. The delivery term allocates the obligation; it does not confer the capacity to perform it or the standing to reclaim anything.

DDP appears most naturally where the seller already operates in the destination market — an exporter with a local subsidiary, a trader with a registered entity, a supplier delivering into a distribution network it controls. In that configuration the asymmetry dissolves, because the seller side of the contract has genuine local standing.

For agricultural consignments the term carries an additional weight that is easy to overlook. Import clearance of food, plant, and animal products is not only a customs event; it commonly involves official controls — documentary, identity, and physical checks against sanitary and phytosanitary requirements. A term that puts import clearance on the seller therefore puts the consequences of a control failure there too. If a consignment is detained, refused, or ordered destroyed at the border, it is the seller who is on risk, because delivery has not yet occurred.

• The seller bears the outcome of border controls it may be unable to attend or influence
• Perishable goods held pending a control decision deteriorate while the seller is still on risk
• Import charges and their recoverability depend on the seller’s status in the destination jurisdiction
• The named place must be specified precisely enough to fix where a long chain of seller obligations finally ends

These are observations about where the term places boundaries and what consequently matters, not a view on whether the rule fits any particular trade.