Compliance Hub

Streamline your shipping processes with the Compliance Hub, which helps you manage HS codes, Country of Origin (COO) information, unit costs (for Swap Clear / B2B2C brands), manufacturer details, and custom descriptions in one location. The Compliance Hub ensures your shipping and customs details are up to date and synced with your store, helping you stay compliant and operationally efficient.

⚠️ The Compliance Hub is only accessible to Admin users.

When you open Compliance Hub for the first time, the system automatically pulls all active products from Shopify into the dashboard. At this stage, compliance data has not yet been evaluated, so the scores will initially show 0% or blank values across all categories (HS Code, Country of Origin, Unit Cost, and Manufacturer ID). This is expected behaviour.

Run a Health Check to begin evaluating your compliance data.

The first step in Compliance Hub is to run a Health Check. You will find the Run Health Check button in the top-right corner of the page.

When you click Run Health Check, the system will:

The Health Check evaluates how many products are compliant and how many require fixes. This process takes a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on the size of your catalogue. Once complete, compliance score cards will appear at the top of the page.

While a health check is running, other actions are paused to ensure accurate results.

After running a Health Check, you will see score cards for:

Each card shows two sections:

Clicking Action Required filters the product table to show only the items that need attention.

HS Code, Country of Origin, and Unit Cost correspond to native fields in Shopify at the variant level. Manufacturer Details, MID Code, and Custom Description do not have native Shopify fields. To support these attributes, standardised metafields have been set up for all brands. Use the provided metafields rather than creating custom fields to ensure consistency and correct data mapping.

HS Codes are required to classify products for international trade and duty calculations. Compliance Hub helps you identify and fix missing or incorrect HS Codes across your catalogue.

Click Fix HS Codes. The system identifies products where an HS Code is missing or requires correction and automatically retrieves the correct six-digit codes. When you click Sync Fixes to Store, the codes are synced directly to Shopify.

Important: Once synced, HS Codes cannot be reverted automatically.

Sometimes a product already has an HS Code, but the system identifies it as incorrect. In this case, you will see a Fix Required icon next to the product. Hover over the icon to see the suggested replacement code before applying the fix. The suggested classifications are typically more detailed and accurate than manually assigned codes.

We recommend maintaining 6-digit HS Codes in your catalogue, as the final digits are evaluated at checkout based on the destination country.

If a product in your Shopify catalogue already has a 10-digit HS Code (HTS code), Compliance Hub compares only the first six digits:

At order time, the system retrieves the HS Code assigned in Shopify (6 or 10 digits) and produces a destination-specific 10-digit code:

The final 10-digit code is used for order documentation and passed to carrier APIs. This code must match the duty calculation to prevent customs clearance issues.

Country of Origin determines which duty rate applies to a product, so every product should have accurate COO data. Unlike HS Codes, COO cannot be determined automatically and must be provided by you.

If the CSV contains rows where COO is missing, the system will return an error. This prevents accidentally overwriting existing COO data with blank values.

Once uploaded successfully, the COO updates in both Compliance Hub and your Shopify variant data, and your compliance score updates automatically. You can download an updated CSV at any time to review your current COO data.

Unit Cost indicates the cost per unit of each product and must be provided by you, as the system cannot automatically determine product cost.

Unit Cost is only relevant for brands using Swap Clear (B2B2C workflow). If your store does not use this model, you do not need to manage this score.

If the CSV contains rows where Unit Cost is missing, the system will return an error. This prevents accidentally overwriting existing Unit Cost data with blank values.

Once uploaded, Unit Cost updates in Compliance Hub and in your Shopify variant data as "Cost per item", and your compliance score updates automatically. You can download an updated CSV at any time.

Cost prices are used to calculate duties on a cost price + 5% markup basis rather than the full retail price, for compliant B2B2C invoicing and customs processing.

Note: Only merchants approved for Swap Clear / B2B2C operations will see Unit Cost fields. If you do not see Unit Cost options, this functionality is not required for your account.

MID codes are required for customs documentation, particularly for shipments to the United States. Compliance Hub provides standardised Shopify metafields for storing and syncing this information for use on commercial invoices.

MID codes are managed at the product level, not the variant level. All variants of a product share the same manufacturer details and MID code.

You can manage MID codes in three ways:

Use this option only if all of your products share the same manufacturer.

You can return to this screen at any time to regenerate and update the MID code.

Important: If your products come from multiple manufacturers, use the manual CSV option instead.

This option is recommended when different products have different manufacturers.

Once processed, MID codes are applied to the corresponding products and synced to Shopify metafields.

If you prefer to manage MID codes directly in Shopify, you can enter them in the predefined metafields created by Compliance Hub, without using the generation or CSV upload options.

Important: When MID codes are entered directly in Shopify, Compliance Hub does not validate or generate the code, and the Manufacturer ID score will not be evaluated for those products. You are responsible for ensuring the accuracy of any MID codes and manufacturer details entered this way.

After manufacturer details are updated via Compliance Hub, the following metafields are updated in Shopify and used for commercial invoice generation:

A Custom Description provides a clear, standardised description of a product for customs documentation. Compliance Hub creates a dedicated Shopify metafield for this value, which is synced and used in downstream documentation.

Custom descriptions are managed at the product level. All variants within the same product share the same custom description. You do not need to create your own metafields — Compliance Hub provides them automatically.

After running a Health Check, a Customs Description Score card appears in the dashboard. The product table also includes a Customs Description column showing the value associated with each product.

Use this option to quickly populate missing descriptions across your catalogue.

Swap AI only generates customs descriptions for active products that do not already have one. Existing descriptions are not overwritten. Generated descriptions appear in the product table and are synced to Shopify metafields immediately.

Use this option if you want full control over descriptions or need to update them in bulk.

Once processed, descriptions are synced to Shopify metafields and are immediately available for downstream use.

You can also manage custom descriptions directly in Shopify using the metafield created by Compliance Hub. Navigate to the product in Shopify, locate the Custom Description metafield, and enter or update the value. Changes made in Shopify are reflected in Compliance Hub.

Important: You do not need to create your own metafields for custom descriptions. Compliance Hub automatically creates and manages these fields in Shopify.

Compliance Hub serves as the single source of truth for product-level customs data, which is automatically included in cross-border documentation.

When you input or upload compliance data in Compliance Hub, it is mapped to products and variant IDs via SKU, then synced to your Shopify product catalogue. Updates are applied at the product level and propagated across all variants.

When an order is placed, the compliance data already synced to Shopify is made available at the line-item level and included in the commercial invoice. Data shared per line item includes:

Important: Full end-to-end flow into commercial invoices is supported for brands using DispatchCloud (via the Voila integration). If your store uses a different warehouse management system, compliance data does not currently flow through to the commercial invoice automatically.

Manually looking up HS codes is time-consuming and prone to inconsistency. By running a Health Check and maintaining HS codes in Compliance Hub, you ensure that the system has an accurate base classification for each product.

If you provide your own HS code, the system treats the first six digits as your final classification and uses them to determine the destination-specific digits. If that base classification is incorrect (for example, using the code for a pen on a t-shirt), duty and tax calculations will also be incorrect. Using Compliance Hub's Health Check helps prevent this by automatically validating codes across your catalogue.

Shopify does not currently support bulk updating of HS Code, Country of Origin, or Unit Cost fields in a straightforward way. Updating them via Shopify would require opening each product variant individually. The CSV upload in Compliance Hub is the recommended approach, particularly during initial onboarding.

Compliance attributes such as HS Code, Country of Origin, and manufacturer details are consistent across all variants of a product. Managing at the product level is simpler and more efficient than updating each variant separately.