FOB vs EXW: making furniture quotes comparable.

This guide is about comparability, not shipping. RFQ Ready does not arrange freight — but no furniture quote comparison survives ignoring what these three letters move.

What each term actually commits to

• EXW — Ex WorksThe price ends at the factory gate. Loading, inland haulage to port, export clearance and everything after are yours — in cost and in risk.
• FOB — Free On BoardThe factory's price carries the goods through origin: to the named port, cleared for export, loaded on board. Cost and risk transfer at the ship's rail.

The named place is part of the term. “FOB” alone is incomplete; “FOB Ho Chi Minh” and “FOB Qingdao” are different commitments with different origin-cost realities behind them.

Why the cheaper-looking quote often isn't

EXW prices look lower because they are — they contain less. The origin costs the factory left out do not disappear; they move to your side of the table, where they are often harder to see and price than they would have been inside the quote. Comparing an EXW number against an FOB number as if they were the same kind of price is the single most common Incoterm error in furniture buying.

A restatement, worked

Illustrative figures. A six-euro “advantage” can evaporate entirely on restatement — or survive. The point is that you cannot know which until the quotes stand on one basis.

Risk moves with the term, not just cost

Under EXW, damage in origin handling is your problem from the factory gate; under FOB it is the factory's until loading. For furniture — bulky, finish-sensitive, damage-prone — that allocation has a real expected cost even when nothing goes wrong, and it belongs in the comparison as a noted difference even after prices are aligned.

The comparability checklist

• Every quote states an Incoterm and a named place — no exceptions.
• One term chosen as the comparison basis; every quote restated to it.
• Origin-side additions estimated per unit at your realistic container utilisation.
• Risk-transfer differences noted alongside the restated prices, not forgotten once the numbers align.
• The chosen basis written into the next RFQ, so the correction is never needed again — the RFQ template fixes it in one line.

One basis, then a market

Restating two quotes is arithmetic; restating a market is a method. A benchmark obtains every quotation on one declared basis from the start — which is why an independent comparison begins with the RFQ, not the spreadsheet. The broader discipline is covered in quote normalization.