Digital Christmas Customs
(Or: How Santa Learned to Stop Worrying and Started Loving Supplier Data)
Santa had a problem. A big problem. And no, for once it wasn’t the naughty list.
Over the last few years, his network of elves has expanded and he has had to manage an ever more complex sourcing regime with depots and warehouses all around the world.
Santa ships a lot of stuff.
For Santa, same day delivery means exactly that - everything delivered on the same day!
Teddy bears to Texas. Lego to Leeds. Train sets to Turin. All merrily jingling through customs. No shortcuts. No exemptions. Just paperwork. Mountains of it.
Paperwork so tall it needed its own reindeer.
Sure, Santa benefits from the global preference system, so there’s no duty to pay. But as any customs officer will tell you:
“Zero duty does not mean zero paperwork.”
Ho. Ho. Oh no.
Santa’s Seasonal Stress Test
Santa’s supply chain stretches from the North Pole to Antarctica. His elves are everywhere. His shipments are constant.
His customs brokers and freight forwarders were already operating at full manual speed — which, in customs terms, is somewhere between “snail” and “reindeer stuck in slush”.
Commercial invoices? Typed by hand
Packing lists? Re-keyed again
HS codes? Copied, pasted, crossed fingers
Country of origin? “We’ll check the spreadsheet”
Santa could see it coming:
More delays. More errors. More broker fees. More explaining to authorities that yes, it really is a toy train.
This was turning into a Silent Night(mare) with a mountain of costs of complexity and endless chases for paperwork.
A radical thought: could elves do the filings?
Santa paused mid-cookie. His supplier elves already have the data:
What’s being shipped
Where it was made
What PO it belongs to
How invoices match to POs and prices / quantities
So Santa asked the question no one had dared to ask before:
“Could we use supplier data to automate customs filings?”
Could customs declarations be digitised at source? Could exporter data flow directly into importer filings? Could borders be crossed digitally without manual keystrokes and headaches?
And most importantly… Could Santa finally stop paying broker fees that cost more than Rudolph’s carrot budget?
Enter: PrimaTrade (and digital Christmas customs)
That’s when Santa discovered PrimaTrade.
PrimaTrade’s platform allows the elves (the supplier elves in the supply chains) — to self-digitise their paperwork at shipment, matching POs to invoices:
Invoices
Packing lists
Purchase orders
Origin data
Product details
All structured. All matched. All ready.
And for all the actual shipments of stuff.
No scanning, no re-typing, no “is this line item the same as that one?”
It turns out that when suppliers digitise documents themselves, customs data just… appears.
Like magic. But with APIs.
From Ho-Ho-Hold Up to Go-Go-Go at the Border
With PrimaTrade in place, Santa’s customs process transformed faster than you can say harmonised system code.
Customs filings became data-driven, not document-driven
Accuracy improved, because data came straight from exporters
Manual entry vanished, along with most of the swearing
Broker fees dropped, because there was less work to do
Agility improved, because forwarders can focus on transport and not on filings
Customs officers were happier. Goods cleared faster. Authorities got cleaner data.
And Santa stopped waking up at 3am worrying about mis-declared plush toys.
As one elf put it:
“It’s like going from handwritten carols to Spotify — still festive, but way more efficient.”
In other words: faster, cheaper, and more accurate trade.
Which is exactly what everyone wants for Christmas.
A PrimaTrade Christmas
By digitising supplier data at source, Santa didn’t just save Christmas — he modernised cross-border trade.
Digital Christmas customs
No more customs chaos. No more paperwork panic. No more elves manually typing HS codes at midnight.
Because when the right data is created early, borders become bridges, not barriers.
PrimaTrade — helping goods cross borders smoothly, even when they come from the North Pole.
And that, dear reader, is how Santa made customs filings duty-free, drama-free, and dad-joke approved.