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

A 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 small food producers and covers the moment of decision, the one that comes before all the others.

The template, to download

The Chamber of Commerce documents cost a few tens of euros, the hours cost the rest, and the hours don't appear on any invoice because they're already paid as salary. The sheet counts them. Then it asks, item by item, whether that cost will come back on the next order, and at the bottom it shows two margins: this order's, and what an identical second order would make.

File	Contents	Link
Cost of the first orderExcel, one sheet	Twenty items already listed across documents, hours and adaptations, the cost of waiting, and the split between one-off and every-order costs.	costo-primo-ordine-estero-en.xlsx

The files are free. There's no form in the way, we don't ask for an email address, and we don't get notified when anyone downloads them. If, once you've filled it in, the hours line isn't the biggest, it usually means not all the hours were counted.

What the documents for exporting cost

This is the part everyone dreads and almost nobody gets wrong, because the fees are public and take ten minutes to find. The Lecce Chamber of Commerce publishes the costs and timescales of export documents, and these are the orders of magnitude.

Document	Cost	Stated timescale
Certificate of origincopy included	€10. Each further copy €5. With a legalisation stamp €8.	Two working days from submission of the complete documentation.
Free sale certificaterequired by various non-EU countries	€3 in administrative fees.	Three working days from submission of the complete documentation.
Stamps and legalisationssignatures and signing powers	€3 for the filing stamp, for legalising 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 your own Chamber publishes. But the point holds everywhere: in euros, these documents are negligible. What costs is the condition written on every row of the right-hand column, from submission of the complete documentation. The Chamber puts it this way: the certificate of origin is issued within two working days of the date all the documentation is submitted. The two days start when the attachments are right, and getting the attachments right takes days of work beforehand.

The cost of a €10 document is the afternoon of the person preparing it, not the fee.

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

The cost of the hours, which doesn't appear on any invoice

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

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

• The spec sheet in the buyer's language, with the fields they insist on, not the ones you already have. It's the document that stalls most deals when it's incomplete, and the right fields are listed in the spec sheet in English, with the template.
• A label that meets the destination market's rules, which change from country to country and have to be checked before the batch is produced, 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.
• Replies to the buyer during negotiations, which bunch up on days when you're also in production.
• Preparing the samples and shipping them, with the paperwork a sample shipment needs anyway.

Putting a number on those days is the only way to decide honestly. All you need is a count of the actual hours and the hourly cost to the business, and it's a sum you do by hand once. The usual surprise is that this item on its own exceeds all the document and transport costs put together.

When you actually get paid

The third item isn't an expense, it's a gap in time, which is why it hardly ever makes it into the estimate. Weeks pass between the goods leaving and the money coming in, during which you've already paid for production, documents and transport.

It's a measured phenomenon. 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 after the agreed terms.

An established business can absorb that delay. For a small producer on its first export order, it all lands in one place, because exposure is highest just when the relationship is newest and the guarantees weakest. Hence a practical rule: on a first order with a new buyer, look at the payment date before the margin, and consider a partial advance payment, which on a first delivery is a normal and accepted request.

The costs that only show up the second time

Some items never appear in the first estimate because they come from a mistake that hasn't been made yet. It's worth knowing them in advance, since they're the most expensive.

Item	Where it comes from	How to prevent it
Relabellingbatch already produced	The label checked after printing, or the destination country's rules read too late.	Have the buyer confirm the draft label before printing. It costs one email and saves a batch.
Goods held at customsdays of demurrage	A document missing, or inconsistent between invoice, packing list and certificate.	Cross-check the three documents before departure, always against the same description of the goods.
Repeat samplesmultiple shipments	Samples sent before knowing which format and product the buyer is really interested in.	Qualify the enquiry before shipping, with the questions gathered in serious buyer or time-waster.
The second order that never comesacquisition cost lost	All the preparation was absorbed by a single order, and nobody noticed the customer had gone quiet.	Keep an eye on the gap between orders, as described in the distributor who doesn't reorder.

How to decide, before saying yes

The honest sum has four lines, and you do it before replying to the buyer.

• Direct costs: documents, transport, packaging, any tests. These are the easy ones, and they're easy to estimate.
• Hours: days of preparation multiplied by the real hourly cost. This is the item that turns the result around.
• Waiting: how many days pass between the goods leaving and payment coming in, and what that gap does to your cash flow.
• Reuse: how much of the work you've prepared stays valid for the next buyer in the same market. It's 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 there won't be any more, is one to turn down or reprice.

When the sum has to be redone every time

For your first export, you do this sum once, carefully, and it teaches you a lot. The problem comes with the fifth enquiry from five different markets, when each would need its own sum and none gets one.

At that point decisions get made on gut feeling, and gut feeling is consistently optimistic, because it counts the selling price and forgets the hours. That's when it pays to have the sum ready in one 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 Diagnostico measures five dimensions of your operation in five minutes (in Italian) and tells you which piece is losing out first. No spam, and the result stays yours.

Questions and answers