I've spoken with some business owners trying to ship to the US. Every single person you deal with in this process seems to have an Indian accent.
It's like working with an especially incompetent government agency which can "accidently" charge you massive fees because Gunpreet put in the wrong code on entry. This takes 3-6 months to be reimbursed after successfully disputing them.
Now, there's additional fees for contracts allowing for online payments instead of having to call some jeet call center to make payments.
Those are basically brokerages, they aren't for ease of use, they're effectively mandatory for most shipments. The bureaucratic app sounds like you needed some type of approval from a government agency which is true and costly for shipping some products.