Trump Ends Tariff Exemption for Small Packages
President Donald Trump has just brought another blow to the besieged electronic commerce industry, which is still in shock from the radical prices that Trump announced in the spring. Trump on Wednesday signed an executive decree expanding the impact of these prices and making more expensive for Americans to buy foreign products on sites like Ebay, Etsy and Amazon.
The ordinance eliminates the so-called “minimis” provision, a long-standing policy that has enabled people in the United States to import packages assessed at less than $ 800 from anywhere in the duty franchise world. These plans will now be subject to the same specific prices in the country as larger expeditions, according to an information sheet published by the White House.
Trump has already got rid of minimis exemption for Chinese products earlier this year. The president’s new decree now removes it for all other countries from August 29. Until then, experts say that many foreign sellers and American companies with offshore warehouses will rush to put their products in the United States. “Expect a lot of sales while brands are trying to liquidate their inventory abroad in the next 30 days,” said Aaron Rubin, CEO of Logistics Shipotro Society, in an article on social networks.
There are some temporary exceptions for packages passing through international postal networks, which means expeditions that are not managed by private companies like DHL or Fedex. Because it is difficult for customs officials to easily calculate the value of these packages, they will be subject to a fixed rate rate between $ 80 and $ 200 per article, at least for the moment. The Trump administration indicates that this special rate rule will expire after six months, when all shipments will then be taxed according to specific prices in the country that Trump began to negotiate with individual countries like Japan.
The exemption from Minmimis was initially designed to allow American travelers to bring gifts and items purchased abroad for personal use without paying tasks. But while the electronic commerce industry has exploded, the rule also made cheaper and more efficient for Americans to order goods online from around the world. Until this year, foreign sellers have often used commercial flaw to send packages directly to the doors of American consumers at very low cost. According to American customs data and border protection, the United States receives an average of 4 million minimis deliveries.
Some of the greatest beneficiaries of the policy were Chinese electronic commerce platforms such as Shein and Temu, which systematically used minimis shipments to maintain low prices and also build supply chains that could meet consumers’ demand in real time. They were the first to be victims of Trump’s prices when he published a decree in April by removing the exemption from packages from China.
When the duty franchise exemption ended, some analysts feared that it is a threat to extinction for Chinese electronic commerce sites, but they have learned to adapt and mostly resume normal operations. TEMU and Shein, however, increased prices on many products to take into account the additional costs of new prices.
