Why the usual advice does not apply
Standard advice optimises freight cost, because on a full container freight is a large share of landed cost. On a few hundred kilograms of amber it is a rounding error against the goods, and optimising it is optimising the wrong number. What matters instead is who carries customs exposure and who can actually resolve a problem at the border.
That inverts the usual preference. For high-value, low-weight goods the right question is not "which term is cheapest" but "which term puts the clearance risk with the party best able to handle it".
The terms that matter here
DDP puts everything on the seller including duty and clearance at destination. It is what most Gulf buyers want, because it removes customs from their side entirely and the freight premium is immaterial at these weights. It requires the seller to have a working relationship with a broker in the destination country, so a supplier offering DDP everywhere without qualification is worth questioning.
FOB and CIF suit buyers who have their own forwarder and broker and would rather control the chain. They are the right choice where the buyer clears goods regularly and knows their customs office better than any foreign supplier could.
EXW is rarely the right answer for this category. It leaves the buyer arranging export documentation in a country whose procedures they do not deal with, which is where consignments get stuck for reasons nobody anticipated.
The documents that actually decide the outcome
Four: commercial invoice, packing list, certificate of origin and HS classification. Most consignments held at customs are held because one of these disagrees with another — a description that does not match the letter of credit wording, an HS code that contradicts the invoice, an origin certificate naming a different consignee.
They should be prepared as a set rather than as separate documents, and for documentary-credit markets the drafts should go to the buyer’s bank before shipment. A discrepancy caught before the goods move costs an email; the same discrepancy caught afterwards costs a fee and a delay, and occasionally the whole season.
Restrictive import regimes change the arithmetic
Where each consignment carries a significant procedural cost — licensing, bank domiciliation, inspection — the usual advice to stage deliveries reverses. Fewer, larger shipments beat several small ones, because the fixed procedural cost applies per consignment regardless of size.
This is why the same buyer should be advised differently depending on destination, and why a supplier who quotes one delivery structure worldwide has not thought about your side of it.