Clearie

Browsing Japanese car exporters? See the Jamaican duty and the real J$ price on every listing, at the Bank of Jamaica rate.

Clearie prices a Japanese used-car listing the way Jamaica Customs will. Open a vehicle on BE FORWARD, SBT Japan or Car From Japan and a badge appears under the price with what that car costs to buy, ship and clear into Jamaica — converted at Bank of Jamaica's published selling rate, which is the rate authorised dealers post at their counters and the one an importer actually pays. WHAT YOU SEE On a vehicle page: the landed cost, with the whole assessment behind a disclosure — CIF, import duty, SCT where it applies, GCT, the environmental levy and the customs administrative fee, each labelled with the rate it was struck at. On a search or category page: a chip under each result's asking price, like "J$4.19M", so a page of forty cars can be read by what they would cost landed rather than by their sticker. Duty depends on things the listing already prints, and Clearie reads them off the page: engine size, weight, fuel, body type, mileage and the destination port. Cars and motorcycles are banded by engine size and everything else by weight, so a double cab is priced on the pickup sheet rather than the car one, and a vehicle the odometer says is not new is charged the used administrative fee without anyone being asked. THE EXCHANGE RATE Bank of Jamaica, re-read whenever the stored copy is more than six hours old, and the badge names the rate it used. If you would rather price at a rate you have been quoted, type it into the popup and the badge uses that instead. WHAT IT WILL NOT GUESS The exporters quote a total to whichever port you picked, and they default to a US one. A total only counts as the Jamaican CIF when the page ties it to Jamaica. Otherwise the estimate is built on the vehicle price alone and the badge marks the figure "+ shipping" — understating with a visible caveat beats charging Jamaican duty on a total bound for Baltimore. Where a total covers freight but not insurance — Car From Japan labels its total C&F — the breakdown names the base it used rather than calling it a CIF it is not. That figure is light by the insurance premium, which is the side to be wrong on. On a search page a chip only appears where the duty band was actually determined. A card that prints no engine size and no weight gets no chip: a landed cost banded on a guess is a wrong number stated confidently, and forty of those is worse than a gap. AGE A car past the Trade Board's six-year limit is flagged with what the buyer would have to arrange. Older units come in on special permits routinely, so the badge says that rather than implying the vehicle cannot be imported. PRIVACY The arithmetic runs in your browser. The listing's address, its exact price, its title and its photographs are never transmitted. Unless you switch it off, Clearie sends our own analytics server a short note of how the badge did: which of the three sites it ran on, whether it found a total quoted to Jamaica or fell back to the vehicle price, the body type it read, whether it priced at Bank of Jamaica's rate or one you typed, and which of five bands the total fell in — "2m–4m" and the like. On a search page it sends how many cards were found and how many could be priced. It also notes an install, a page it could not read at all, and a breakdown you opened. Nothing in it identifies you or the listing. Exporter pages change without notice, and an extractor that has quietly stopped working looks exactly like a page with no badge, which is what that note is for. To switch it off: click the Clearie icon and un-tick "Send anonymous usage events". No accounts, no sign-in, no cookies, no advertising, no data brokers, nothing sold or shared. Full policy at https://tryclearie.com/privacy. AN ESTIMATE, NOT A QUOTE Customs charges at the Bank of Jamaica rate on the day of clearance, which is not today's, and it may question an invoice well under the market value for that make, model and year. The figure holds for a listing bought at its asking price, and an unusually cheap one is the case where it may not. Clearie is not affiliated with BE FORWARD, SBT Japan, Car From Japan, Bank of Jamaica or the Jamaica Customs Agency.