The question comes up the moment a brand ships its first gifted product internationally: the Shopify order is $0, so what number goes in the declared value field when you generate the shipping label? The instinct is to match it, $0 order, $0 declared value. That instinct is wrong, and it is the single most common paperwork mistake in gifting internationally.

The order total and the customs declared value are two different concepts that happen to live on the same shipment. Separating them correctly is the entire fix.

Two separate numbers, two separate purposes

The Shopify order total answers one question: what did the creator pay? For a gifted order, the answer is $0, and that number lives entirely inside Shopify. It has no field on a customs form and customs never sees it.

The customs declared value answers a completely different question: what are the goods inside this parcel worth? That number lives on the commercial invoice you generate through your carrier or label tool, EasyPost, Shippo, ShipStation, Shopify Shipping, or whatever you use, and it is independent of what anyone was charged. Customs uses it to assess duty and import tax, decide whether the parcel needs manual review, and, in some countries, whether it qualifies for a gift exemption threshold.

Nothing about a $0 Shopify order requires a $0 declared value. Treating them as the same field is where both of the common mistakes below come from.

Mistake one: leaving declared value at $0

Most label tools default the declared value field to something, and if a merchant does not deliberately fill it in, it is easy to leave it blank or at $0 without noticing. A parcel that is obviously an actual product, in retail packaging, with a barcode, declared at $0 in value, does not read as accurate to a customs officer. It reads as an attempt to dodge duty entirely, and that is a well-known enough pattern that a suspiciously low or zero declared value is a common trigger for manual review on its own.

The practical cost of that review is delay, sometimes days, sometimes long enough to blow through a campaign timing window, and in some cases the parcel gets returned or refused entry rather than cleared. Either outcome undercuts the entire point of shipping the product to a creator who agreed to work with you.

Mistake two: declaring full retail value

The opposite instinct, since the goods clearly are not worthless, is to declare what the product actually sells for at retail. This avoids the suspicion problem, but creates a different one: customs assesses duty and import tax based on that declared value, and bills the recipient. The creator receives a parcel they paid nothing for, from a brand that promised the product was free, and then gets a bill from their own country's customs authority for a percentage of the retail price you declared. That is the exact outcome gifting is supposed to avoid, and it is entirely a paperwork choice, not an unavoidable cost of shipping internationally.

This mistake is less visible to the brand than the first one, because you will likely never hear about it unless the creator tells you, or stops responding after the parcel arrives with an unexpected bill attached.

The number that actually works: cost of goods

The standard used by brands who get this right consistently is to declare the cost of goods, what it actually costs you to produce or acquire the unit, rather than the price a customer would pay for it. That number is:

  • Non-zero and defensible. It reflects a real value for the goods, which is what customs is checking for, so it does not read as an attempt to avoid duty.
  • Lower than retail. If any duty does get assessed, it is calculated against a smaller number, which keeps the creator's potential exposure lower than a retail-based declaration would.
  • Consistent with what you'd declare on any other sample shipment. Cost-basis declared value is standard practice for samples, press units, and gifted product generally, not a special workaround invented for influencer gifting.

If your product line has a wide cost range, keep a simple reference sheet mapping SKU to cost-of-goods value, so whoever generates the label, you, a teammate, or a warehouse contact, is not guessing or defaulting to retail out of convenience.

Where this actually gets entered

The declared value field lives in your carrier or label tool, not in Shopify itself. Depending on your setup:

  • Shopify Shipping prompts for a customs value when you buy an international label directly from an order, pulling a default from the product's price unless you override it, which is exactly the moment to swap in cost of goods instead.
  • Third-party label tools (EasyPost, Shippo, ShipStation, and similar) have a dedicated customs value field per line item on international shipments, separate from anything about what the order charged.
  • Manual carrier forms, if you are printing labels by hand at a post office or courier counter, ask for the same information as a line item on the commercial invoice, described contents and value.

In every case, the field is asking about the goods, not the transaction, and the fix is the same regardless of tool: fill it in deliberately with a cost-basis number instead of accepting whatever default shows up or copying the $0 order total.

The gift checkbox helps, but only alongside an accurate value

Some carriers let you mark a shipment type as a gift, and some destination countries apply a separate, often lower, duty-free threshold to parcels marked that way. That checkbox is worth using when it is available, but it is not a substitute for an accurate declared value. Customs still calculates against the declared value on the invoice; the gift marking at most changes the threshold that value gets compared against. A gift-marked parcel with an inflated declared value can still trigger duty above that threshold, and a gift-marked parcel with a $0 declared value can still get flagged for the same reason an unmarked one would.

How this connects to the broader customs picture

Declared value is one piece of a larger international shipping setup that also includes who pays any duty that does get assessed (DDP versus DDU), which categories are restricted in which countries, and how long customs holds typically run. If you are setting up international gifting for the first time, the full operational picture, including how to avoid landing the creator with a duty bill at all, is covered in how to ship gifted product internationally without a creator duty bill. That post covers protecting the creator on the receiving end; this one is the paperwork you fill out on the sending end to make that possible.

Get the declared value right once, standardize it per SKU, and the customs form stops being something you fill in from memory or guesswork on every international shipment.