Comment by UncleOxidant
7 hours ago
I recently went through the exercise of asking one of the Chinese manufacturers how much it would cost to build me a board (a bit pirate adapter board for ESP3 that does all the voltage conversions to the GPIO pins so you don't burn something out). Board layout & BOM already exist on github. They do 5 boards minimum. Ok, so I figure I can sell the other 4 boards, probably not a big deal. Total's about $400. Then we get to the point where I'm about the pull the trigger and it goes to a page on tariffs and it looks like at least 45% + they want my SSN to give to CBP to collect the tariff. That's a hard "Nope" on sending my SSN to China. So I'm going to give this a look.
What company is asking for your SSN?
This is all very common practice. Has been for at least a decade. Some companies require this info for them to purchase from you as well.
This is one of the benefits of being a company. You use the tax ID instead of your social security number.
I've never had to provide an EIN or SSN when using DDP shipping, which is what you should be using unless you have a huge order.
2 replies →
PCBWay, but I suspect all of the Chinese manufacturers have to do this now.
I've ordered hundreds of things from JLC over the last decade. Both bare boards and assembled boards based on my own designs that I uploaded, BOMs i provided, and sometimes even special parts I had shipped to them. All ordered boards arrived to me just fine over their cheap shipping (name varied often, last i recall was "direct standard line") and over DHL, and precisely zero times was I asked for my SSN.
That's been my experience. I've never been asked for a SSN, and I wouldn't give one if they had.