What the first export order costs. The documents are the smallest item.

The first export order rarely disappoints on the selling price. It disappoints on the margin left at the end, and almost always because of items that weren't on the table when you said yes.

This piece is part of the guide to export operations for the small food producer and covers the moment of decision, that is, the one that comes before all the others.

The template, to download

Chamber documents cost a few tens of euros, hours cost the rest, and hours appear on no invoice because they are already paid as salary. The sheet counts them. Then it asks, item by item, whether that cost will come back with the next order, and at the bottom it shows two margins: that of this order and that of an identical second order. The file is in Italian.

File	What it contains	Link
Cost of the first orderExcel, one sheet	Twenty items already written across documents, hours and adaptations, the cost of waiting, and the split between once only and every order.	costo-primo-ordine-estero.xlsx

The files are free. There is no form in front of them, we don't ask for an address and we receive no notification when someone downloads them. If after filling it in the hours line isn't the highest, it usually means not all the hours were counted.

What the documents for exporting cost

This is the part everyone fears and almost nobody gets wrong, because the fees are public and can be found in ten minutes. The Lecce Chamber of Commerce publishes the costs and timing of export documents, and the orders of magnitude are these.

Document	Cost	Stated time
Certificate of origincopy included	€10. Each further copy €5. With legalisation stamp €8.	Two working days from submission of the complete documentation.
Free sale certificaterequired by various non-EU countries	€3 in secretarial fees.	Three working days from submission of the complete documentation.
Stamps and legalisationssignatures and signing powers	€3 for the filing stamp, for legalisation of the official's signature and for the stamp on signing powers.	Two working days from submission of the complete documentation.

Fees may vary from one Chamber to another, so the number to use is the one published by yours. The point holds everywhere, though: in euros these documents are negligible. What costs is the condition written in every row of the right-hand column, that is, from submission of the complete documentation. The Chamber puts it this way: «The certificate of origin is issued within two working days from the date of submission of all the documentation». The two days start when the attachments are right, and the right attachments take days of work beforehand.

The cost of a €10 document is the afternoon of whoever prepares it, not the fee.

For goods going to countries with preferential agreements, the question of origin and the EUR.1 certificate is added, which has rules of its own and is covered in the export operations guide.

The cost of hours, which appears on no invoice

This is the biggest of the ignored items, and it slips through for a simple accounting reason: whoever does that work is already on salary. Nobody issues an invoice for the time spent filling in a sheet, so that time doesn't appear, so it seems to have cost nothing.

On the first order to a new market the real work is this, and it is almost all work done once only.

• The technical sheet in the buyer's language, with the fields they demand and not the ones you already have. It is the document that stalls most negotiations when it is incomplete, and the correct fields are listed in the technical sheet in English with the template.
• The label compliant with the destination market, which changes from country to country and should be checked before producing the batch, not after.
• The export price list, which isn't the domestic price list with a discount, because it has to hold up with an Incoterm, a minimum volume and a format.
• The replies to the buyer during the negotiation, which concentrate in days when you are also producing.
• Preparing the samples and shipping them, with the documents a sample shipment requires anyway.

Putting a number on these days is the only way to decide honestly. All it takes is the count of actual hours and the company's hourly cost, and it is a calculation done by hand once. The typical surprise is that this item on its own exceeds all document and transport costs put together.

When you really get paid

The third item isn't an expense, it is a distance in time, and that is why it almost never enters the quote. Between the goods leaving and the money coming in weeks go by, during which production, documents and transport have already been paid for by you.

The phenomenon is measured. Intrum's European Payment Report 2025 finds that European businesses spend about 73 working days a year chasing payments, and that about 11% of revenue is collected past the agreed terms.

In a structured company that delay is absorbed. For a small producer on their first export order it all concentrates at one point, because exposure is greatest precisely when the relationship is youngest and guarantees are minimal. Hence a practical rule: on the first order with a new buyer, look at the payment date before the margin, and consider a partial advance payment, which on a first supply is a normal and accepted request.

The costs that only appear the second time

Some items never show up in the first quote because they come from a mistake not yet made. It pays to know them in advance, since they are the most expensive.

Item	Where it comes from	How it is prevented
Relabellingbatch already produced	Label checked after printing, or the destination country's rules read too late.	Have the buyer confirm the label draft before printing. It costs an email and saves a batch.
Goods held at customsdays of demurrage	A missing or inconsistent document between invoice, packing list and certificate.	Cross-check the three documents before departure, always on the same description of goods.
Repeated samplesmultiple shipments	Samples sent before knowing the format and product that really interest them.	Qualify the enquiry before shipping, with the questions collected in serious buyer or time-waster.
The second order that doesn't comeacquisition cost lost	All the preparation was absorbed by a single order, and nobody noticed the customer had stopped.	Watch the interval between orders, as described in the distributor who doesn't reorder.

How to decide, before saying yes

The honest sums come to four lines, and they are done before replying to the buyer.

• Direct costs: documents, transport, packaging, any analyses. These are the easy ones, and they are estimated well.
• Hours: days of preparation multiplied by the real hourly cost. It is the item that overturns the result.
• Waiting: how many days pass between the goods leaving and payment, and how much that gap weighs on your cash.
• Reuse: which part of the work prepared remains valid for the next buyer in the same market. It is the only positive item of the four, and it turns an apparent loss into an investment.

A first order that loses on the first three lines and wins on the fourth is a good order. A first order that loses on all four, typically because the destination market is isolated and no more will be needed, is an order to refuse or reprice.

When the sums have to be redone every time

On the first export this calculation is done once, carefully, and teaches a great deal. The problem comes at the fifth enquiry from five different markets, when each would need its own sums and none gets them.

At that point decisions are taken by feel, and feel is systematically optimistic, because it counts the selling price and forgets the hours. It is the moment when it pays to have the sums ready in a single place, together with the status of every enquiry, which is what the single archive of customers and orders keeps.

If you want a measured starting point instead of an estimate from memory, the Diagnostic measures five dimensions of your operation in five minutes (in Italian) and tells you which piece loses first. No spam, and the result stays yours.

Questions and answers