Comment by TrackerFF
8 days ago
From what I understand, de minimis exemption has also been removed.
That is a huge, huge deal. It effectively means that all goods imported from China will be slapped with a 30% import tax, as soon as said goods arrive the US border / customs.
Usually what happens then, is that the courier will pay that tax, and then bill the recipient later on - as well as charge some fee/fees for the work done.
This is why in some European countries, that $1 item from China with free shipping can end up costing $10, because you're paying $0.25 in VAT or import taxes, and $10 to the shipping courier for doing the paperwork.
If that is the case in the US, I fully expect total chaos and mayhem when all the Temu / AliExpress/ Wish customers start receiving extra bills for their orders.
(That's just from the most obvious consumer example...then you have pretty much everything else. Goods, commodities, etc.)
EDIT: I found more info here https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...
So it is even worse, you either pay $25 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher. Then later it moves up to $50 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher.
a $1 item with $1 shipping will end up costing you as much as $52 after June!
> This is why in some European countries, that $1 item from China with free shipping can end up costing $10, because you're paying $0.25 in VAT or import taxes, and $10 to the shipping courier for doing the paperwork.
Not the big China exporters, not any more. They all include taxes in the price on your country specific web site, ship to their warehouses inside the EU, handle taxes and your local courier just delivers.
Now if you're talking DHL yes, they have you fill forms upon forms and charge you for the forms you didn't ask for. But if that happens, no one will have time to process all the forms so private imports from China will simply ... halt for a while. Until Temu/AliExpress/etc sort out for the US the same system they use in the EU.
If in the US, I'd hold on any direct purchases from China for 3-6 months.
> So it is even worse, you either pay $25 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher. Then later it moves up to $50 per shipment, or 30% - whichever is higher.
Hah. That's DHL commission territory :) Definitely hold from direct purchases until Temu sorts it out for you.
> Until Temu/AliExpress/etc sort out for the US the same system they use in the EU.
The thing is, the EU specifically set up a structure to make this easier for sellers and transparent for customers (the "import one-stop shop") and I don't see the US government doing any effort to make importations more seamless.
Didn't know that. I'm just a stupid EU sheep.
Incidentally, even Amazon US uses that facility. They charge me my local VAT plus some change ("exchange rate whatever" commission, something under 1%) and the package arrives in my hands via courier without any further interaction.
Even Mouser has set up a warehouse inside the EU in the past years. They went from a pain to order from to a pleasure.
Just to emphasise, this system has been set up for ages because you did need to pay VAT on imports anyway. Even without any special tariffs. And that means a visit to the post office in person.
For reference: https://vat-one-stop-shop.ec.europa.eu/one-stop-shop_en
Yeah EU doesn't have a special tariff per se, but they wanted a responsible legal entity in EU to deal with taxes and customer rights so they created this structure.
US just doesn't want anything imported. Doesn't help to set up US entity. You will have to pay this amount. Though, it helps with $1 orders if they import them and process them in bulk.
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Well, the point of the action in the US is to stop imports, not just tax them, so manufacturing moves into the US. The minimum fee per item is clearly punitive.
Not that that matters, most manufacturing will simply never be in the US ever again, and having punitive taxes like this will simply drive up costs massively.
If I buy something from amazon.co.jp or Apple and it arrives from Japan or China with DHL/UPS, I don't do anything at all in Poland. It's all transparent, I just get the package for the price on the website.
From which Apple store? If it's your local store of course they have VAT built in.
Interesting about amazon japan, never tried it. Have you tried amazon us?
Edit: interesting, amazon.co.jp seems to be its own thing. My login works on amazon US and all european country sites, but it doesn't work on the JP site.
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I suspect that this $25/50 per item policy is to prevent people from claiming a lower value than the actual price of the item. I've received international packages marked "gift" with a value of $10 that I had paid much more for.
I doubt the US will even manufacture substitutes for most of the things I liked and ordered from AliExpress. People with hobbies primarily supplied by Chinese manufacturing (like mine- electronics, 3D printing, FPV drones) are just going to be paying more for the same thing. There's no way we'll get an American substitute for niche products- all the US chip fabs are going to be filled with orders for higher dollar parts.
Note that the fact sheet says per item, not per shipment. So there doesn't even seem to be a way to make one big purchase of several items to pay a single fee. They will hit you for every item in the shipment.
Quick edit: I also note that the fact sheet makes a distinction between things sent through international post vs. other means. If you send via UPS/FedEx/DHL there will be regular customs fees (34%?), and through post you will have the $25/50 per item fee. So I will definitely have to pay attention to the shipping method for anything bought from AliExpress from now on.
Quick edit 2: I literally have a PicoCalc from ClockworkPi coming in the mail in a few days- I guess we'll see if DHL charges me any extra fees.
I wonder how item will be defined. If I order a pack of 100 tiny magnets from AliExpress, is that $30 or $3000?
To add some color: when I've placed orders like this in the past the small items didn't come packed like consumer goods in a nice box but in something like a zip lock bag or an envelope.
It's per package overall, surely...
Not per item within the package. Per shipping item.
Also people buying stationary stuff from China, how will their pricing be?
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Realistically, the $25 minimum is to cover the costs of handling the imports (with some premium), so it doesn't make sense to charge it for every item in a batch separately.
Great. AliExpress was the RadioShack of 2025. No way I’m spending $25+ for a strip of SMD resistors, and I expect to never see them available in the US at a price that makes sense as a hobbyist. This isn’t helping anyone, will prevent a lot of prototyping, and just be a bad experience in life. Thanks for ruining the fun of the last 5-10 years of DIY electronics golden age.
I had plans to build some animatronic Halloween decorations for this year over the summer. I’m not going to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on parts that nominally cost less than $50.
My own pain is minor though compared to everyone I know who uses Temu and other things to basically outfit their life. This will be insanely regressive as they have the least to spend on “on brand” products, which themselves are imported too. This is like “super sales tax for the poor.” Me, I’ll just save my money and wait for the next president to undo the mess. My buddies not as successful monetarily as me? Their quality is life is going down the drain.
This is what happened in Sweden about 10 years ago, when they started charging a $7 "administrative fee" on all packages privately imported from China. Prices for resistors went from $1 for a pack of a hundred to $8. As a student at the time, it effectively made the hobby non-viable over night because it got too expensive.
Lately, there have been some domestic actors filling in the gap. But it's still a significant cost increase compared to the glory days.
Since around 2020, you've been able to pay Swedish VAT when you purchase from Ali Express etc. The resistors increase from $1 to $1.25, with the $0.25 going to the Swedish treasury.
Do you not have electronics shops in Sweden? Copenhagen has ElEkstra: https://www.elextra.dk/en-gb/components/modstande/smd-modsta...
People will just ship large quantities and then warehouse them in the US.
Sounds like you have some cool projects planned.... do you have any pics/links you can share?
De minimis exemption expiring has been a planned thing for years through administrations of both parties. Trump admin has been delaying the already planned expiration during the Biden years to use as a negotiating carrot.
Basically it just means Temu/Aliexpress/Etc. will ship their goods to the US in bulk instead of bypassing customs on individual small orders, and distribute from domestic warehouses, having to now compete with US producers who do the same thing.
It does completely kill any business built on dropshipping individual orders from chinese factories without ever touching inventory however.
I'm inclined to believe they're already doing something like this. I don't shop them but my wife uses Shein and Temu pretty often, and commented last year that more and more stuff was shipping from the US rather than overseas now.
In Europe, Alibaba has their own warehouse in the Netherlands. I wonder if that's to be able to do a single "international" import. Could the same happen in the US?
Aliexpress does that as well, with a warehouse in Hungary. They ship the products there, import them en masse as a business, then relabel and send them off to the recipients.
Alibaba is Aliexpress. They have multiple warehouses around europe.
They may be compelled to do that; there's 1.3 million packages from Chinese retailers a day coming in through the Netherlands, but since they're all individual packages, they fall under a threshold for import taxes. There's now calls to drop that threshold so that people pay import taxes for small items as well, and / or to compel Temu and co to stop shipping individual packages but do it in bulk.
The exemption for low value imports was removed a few years ago, see other comments near this one in the discussion.
Purchases from Temu pay EU VAT according to the location of the purchaser, and an electronic system means the money sent to Temu gets to the EU and the package can sail through customs.
FWIW eliminating the de minimis exemption had already been proposed by President Biden late last year:
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statement...
Courier will only pay the tax if it's a DDP solution, and then bill it back to the actual merchant. FedEx, DHL, and UPS provide this as an option. If it goes USPS, or no DDP solution is in place, it's going DDU and it will simply be stuck in a sufferance warehouse or at the local post office until the recipient comes in and pays the bill.
I think price uncertainty is already hitting eBay. A few days ago I looked at the price of cheap musical instruments (a student violin and a trumpet that each cost $25 several years ago) and the low price is now $129. Some things seem to have disappeared almost entirely from eBay (most small portable ozone generators). Maybe this is temporary until sellers figure it all out.
>> If that is the case in the US, I fully expect total chaos and mayhem when all the Temu / AliExpress/ Wish customers start receiving extra bills for their orders.
All three of those stores are very popular in my part of Europe. So there must be some workaround. Based on your edit I would guess that they would import a bunch of orders in one shipment to make the 'per shipment' charge small per item/order.
Sounds like a good idea, but how are they actually going to implement and enforce that?
Do they open every package? What stops Temu or whatever from just keep sending them? I mean drugs get through so ..
Yeah, the stopping drugs thing is just performative propaganda. It’s really about the money, and the attempt to punish China (which will in fact mostly hurt Americans as much or more, anyways). If it were about the drugs only, there wouldn’t be such punitive measures, and the press release wouldn’t mention the fact that China doesn’t have a de minimus exception.
I had not heard about the de minimis removal. That would be crazy. I assume that would be the end of every dollar store in the country right?
crazy thought, maybe a $1 item shouldn’t be shipped from overseas at great expense to the environment? 5 years ago all anybody would talk about is the environment and now people are burning down EVs and complaining that they’ll have to pay more for a cheap $1 shirt they don’t need to be moved 6000 or more miles? make this make sense.
> make this make sense.
Sure. Modern Chinese RoRo vessels fit more than 1 shirt on them. The average shipping manifest to America looks more like 125,000 shirts, 10,000 tons displacement of natural gas, 40,000 sex toys, 20,000 Macbooks and a few dozen merchant marines making the trip. The "great cost to the environment" was manufacturing these products. The carbon footprint for shipping linens around the world is negligible, and cheaper than buying American-made.
It doesn't take a genius to see that this isn't an environmental issue, China will fuel up their boats regardless and take their surplus elsewhere. This is about American businesses outright failing to compete in the free market in places that matter, like car manufacturing and $1 tee shirt factories.
A RoRo freighter is designed for vehicles to "roll on, roll off". They don't haul regular freight.
I agree that it's very unlikely that near shoring simple electronics and T-shirts will be the big needle mover for emissions. What's much worse is the human rights violations but that's a totally different conversation from what the GP said.
>> If that is the case in the US, I fully expect total chaos and mayhem when all the Temu / AliExpress/ Wish customers start receiving extra bills for their orders.
All three of those stores are very popular in my part of Europe. So there must be some workaround.
Well, the good news is almost nobody is gonna like this, so I don't anticipate it lasting beyond Trump's presidency, assuming he makes it 4 years at this rate. The bad news is that even after tariffs are removed, it will take years for prices to recover, if they ever do.
Actually one policy that Biden kept in place after the 2020 elections was the Trump Tariffs.
I think we are underestimating how popular protectionism is with progressives, it may turn out to be an unusual alliance between disaffected voters on the far right and left outnumbering free trade advocates in the center of both parties.
I haven’t seen any progressives in favor of this. Disaffected voters on the left want more housing and universal health care, not tariffs on avocados. Disaffected voters on the right just like to see libs getting owned… but they won’t appreciate their wallets being liberated of their money.
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They're going to try to make sure we never have fair elections again. I'm not saying they're going to succeed, but they're sure as hell going to try, which is terrifying.
After this, I don't think they'll succeed. This is Trump's Afghanistan pullout moment. His approval will crater and never recover. He's not surrounded by adults like the first time around.
Many of extra bills are absolutely not going to get paid.
So is AMZN stock up?
Do you expect their annual turnover to go up? They might get a bigger slize of the pie but the pie itself is getting smaller. Pre trade AMZN was down 7%
Well, given that 90% of stuff on Amazon is relabeled crud from Ali Express...
Yeah, but it sounds like the tariff is a higher percent for single item shipments. That means that aliexpress would sell less to individuals and more to Amazon resellers.
Down 6% in premarket, will have to wait and see but likely wont help them much as tariffs will impact a significant amount of their products regardless.
Most of the stuff on amazon comes from China, so I doubt it.
In addition to what everyone else has said, if Europe goes through with the new "Big Tech tax" and/or tariffs on digital services, AWS would presumably take a big hit.
Here's a much more detailed analysis of the effects of the executive order: https://chatgpt.com/share/67ee10c6-4690-8006-83d7-8e9b22bccf...
The practical takeaway is that the average household will spend $3,500-4,000 more as a result of the tariffs. Clothes, furniture, toys will be about 30% more expensive, electronics will be about 25% more expensive, tires and jewelry about 15% more expensive, and industrial buyers are going to get hosed when they buy equipment.
There were major carve-outs for the auto industry (yay Michigan) and petrochemical industries (yay Gulf Coast); they’ll still get hosed on equipment but will mostly escape increases in cost of materials. Imported cars/trucks aren’t directly affected either.
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Meta discussion:
I can't do an analysis on the de minimis situation, I don't know of any public datasets that would allow such an analysis, and it's obvious that it will have extremely complex effects (and therefore, any first-order analysis would be very low-quality).
Note on ChatGPT-4.5 "Deep Research": I spot-checked the calculations for HS codes using my own research and the numbers seemed reasonably close to my own. https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/treemap is an invaluable resource for this kind of analysis. ChatGPT fumbled the bag on HS 30: Pharmaceutical products, by not excluding products listed in Annex II, which overestimated total tariffs by about 6% ($30 billion), but the net effect on households is still in the right ballpark (+/- 20%).
Edit: This isn't one of those simple low-effort posts that say "omg look what ChatGPT said". I'm capable of doing this analysis on my own, and I checked ChatGPT's work for the largest contributing categories of goods. Sometimes we disagreed by 10% or so, but overall the results checked out except for Pharmaceuticals, which I caught and didn't repeat misinformation in my "practical effects" tl;dr. The only way it is significantly wrong is if both myself and ChatGPT missed some large tariff category and assumed it was small - that could raise the real costs above the numbers in the analysis - but I checked all the largest categories that ChatGPT identified as well as all the largest categories from our largest trade partners shown by the Atlas of Economic Complexity, so it's somewhat unlikely that happened.
I purposefully didn't include 2nd and 3rd order effects (e.g. chained CPI) because they are usually relatively small, massively uncertain (my analysis would be worth as much as dog poop on a shoe) and those higher-order effects take too long to manifest. It's not worth predicting costs out 2+ years because the political environment is far too unstable. Just today, the U.S. Senate voted to block all the Canadian tariffs and end the "state-of-emergency" that this executive order is standing on. Front-page diplomacy or private back-room deals could make Trump adjust tariffs up or down on various nations multiple times this year. Who knows what the situation will be 6 months from now, let alone 5 years from now when global supply chains and pricing elasticity might re-normalize. The fact that ChatGPT didn't include these effects is a point in its favor, not a glaring oversight.
I'm not complaining about downvotes but if you are downvoting this, please let me know why so that I can improve. I put a lot of work into this far beyond just typing some crap into ChatGPT and I think these numbers add a lot to the discussion.
Do not post ChatGPT output on HN.
I spent the past 30 minutes calculating this all manually using the sources listed below:
The practical takeaway is that the average household will spend $3,488.27 more as a result of the tariffs. Clothes, furniture, toys will be (mean) 26.9% more expensive, electronics will be 24.4% more expensive, tires and jewelry 16.2% and 17.1% more expensive, respectively.
If this is more acceptable to you, please voice your approval.
[0]: https://wits.worldbank.org [1]: https://dataweb.usitc.gov [2]: http://atlas.hks.harvard.edu
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> This is why in some European countries, that $1 item from China with free shipping can end up costing $10
This is what strikes me about these new tariffs... for all the concern about how it's going to impact the US economy (and I don't doubt it will), this is STILL far, far, less protectionism than literally every other country in the entire world. Donald Trump's justification for all this is that the U.S. is propping up the entire world economy to it's own detriment, and I'm not sure he's necessarily wrong here.
Based upon someone's imaginary example?
"less protectionism than literally every other country in the entire world"
I ordered from Temu and it's shipped from China and arrives at my door with my local sales tax applied -- because Temu abides by Canadian law -- but otherwise with no additional fees. Got a pair of headphones and a three timer device yesterday for $10 CAD.
Or you know, Trump's constant yapping about Canada's diary tariff. In reality the US ships 4x more dairy to Canada tariff free than the reverse, and we, by design, do not target sending dairy to the US. But Trump takes advantage of the poorly informed and/or stupid, and it works amazingly.
>U.S. is propping up the entire world economy to it's own detriment
If you're sitting in the richest large country in the world, literally at the height of its economic accomplishment, and you really buy it when someone tells you that you're the victim, you might be profoundly misinformed and with literally zero context of reality.
The US has an amazing amount to fall, and it's going to happen. And when you're working on the assembly line doing extremely low value work, having been ostracized by the entire planet, enjoy how you made the libs pay.