Importers, exporters, logistics firms and specialist shippers use tradePhlo to file their own UK declarations: fewer agent fees, faster clearance and full visibility over every shipment.
Each business below moved its declarations from a third-party agent onto tradePhlo. We describe them by sector, not by name. The pattern repeats: less spent on agents, fewer delays, and a team that controls its own customs.
A long-established art dealership moves works across borders for exhibitions, sales and purchases. When CHIEF closed and CDS took over, they needed to manage bonded warehousing, temporary admission and release to free circulation themselves. With tradePhlo their team now files directly, tracks declaration status in real time and controls deferment-account payments.
A round-the-clock logistics operator was paying an agent for every declaration, and that step had become the slowest, most expensive part of an otherwise automated business. After finding tradePhlo on the HMRC developer list, they brought declarations in-house, cut manual data entry and cleared shipments faster for their customers.
A UK retailer trading thousands of products across dozens of categories, including perishable food and drink, faced zero tolerance for customs delays. They turned to tradePhlo to handle the full range of import and export procedures, including CDS handling for low-value parcels, and kept goods moving through the CHIEF-to-CDS switch.
Filing your own declarations on a flat subscription removes per-declaration agent fees. Your customs bill stops scaling with your shipment volume.
Submit declarations and supporting documents to HMRC digitally and watch the status update on screen, rather than waiting on an intermediary.
See every declaration in one place, manage deferment-account payments, and keep ownership of your customs data instead of handing it to a broker.
Bonded warehousing, temporary admission, returned-goods relief and other special procedures are supported, so you can optimise duty and VAT with confidence.
For most of these businesses the trigger was the same: HMRC retired CHIEF and replaced it with CDS, and the cost and friction of relying on a customs agent became hard to justify. The declaration step was slow, opaque and priced per transaction, in operations that were otherwise highly automated.
tradePhlo gives them a guided, self-service platform to file UK CDS and NCTS transit declarations directly. Teams are trained on the system, then take over their own submissions, gaining real-time status, digital document upload to HMRC for quicker clearance, and direct control of duty and VAT through special procedures.
Want to see how this would work on your own shipments? Bring a few real declarations and we will walk through them with you.
Book a 30-minute demo and we will build a declaration from one of your real shipments, with clear pricing from the start.