Beyond the Quoted Price: An Evidence Framework for Landed-Cost and Delivery-Scope Uncertainty in Cross-Border B2B Sourcing

This working paper asks which evidence fields are necessary to prevent quoted unit price and shipping language from being mistaken for total landed cost in cross-border B2B sourcing. It presents the Landed-Cost Evidence Envelope, which keeps directly quoted, delivery-scope-allocated, estimated and unresolved cost layers separate, and a three-state gate: comparable, conditionally comparable or not decision-ready. Methods: purposive evidence synthesis of official ICC, WTO and UNCTAD materials plus full-text scholarly work on landed cost and FAIR evidence practices, followed by a reproducible synthetic design test. The paper reports no customer trial, representative market survey, realized transaction dataset or savings claim. Status: working paper version 1.0, published 30 October 2026, not peer reviewed. The fictional example contains no customer, supplier or marketplace data. Numerical claims are reproduced by the accompanying CSV and Python script. AI assistance: OpenAI tools assisted literature discovery, source-note organization, drafting, arithmetic checking, code generation and visual creation. The manuscript identifies AI-generated conceptual artwork and distinguishes it from empirical evidence. Competing interest: Mohammad Maani is Founder of QuickAIBuy and has a commercial interest in the initiative. The paper reports no paid evaluation, supplier endorsement or product-performance experiment. QuickAIBuy: https://www.quickaibuy.comCanonical DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23793050