US President Donald Trump just dealt another blow to the embattled ecommerce industry, which is still reeling from sweeping tariffs Trump announced in the spring. On Wednesday, Trump signed an executive order widening the impact of those tariffs and making it more expensive for Americans to buy foreign products on sites like eBay, Etsy, and Amazon.
The order eliminates the so-called “de minimis” provision, a longstanding policy that allowed people in the US to import packages valued at less than $800 from anywhere in the world duty-free. Those packages will now be subject to the same country-specific tariffs as larger shipments, according to a fact sheet released by the White House.
Trump already got rid of the de minimis exemption for Chinese goods earlier this year. The president’s new executive order now removes it for every other country beginning on August 29. Until then, experts say that many foreign sellers and American companies with offshore warehouses will be scrambling to get their goods into the US. “Expect a bunch of sales as brands try to liquidate their overseas inventory in the next 30 days,” Aaron Rubin, CEO of the logistics firm ShipHero, said in a social media post.
There’s some temporary exceptions for packages going through international postal networks, meaning shipments that are not handled by private companies like DHL or FedEx. Because it’s difficult for customs officials to readily calculate the value of these packages, they will be subject to a fixed tariff rate between $80 to $200 per item, at least for now. The Trump administration says this special tariff rule will expire after six months, when all shipments will then be taxed according to the country-specific tariffs that Trump has begun negotiating with individual countries like Japan.
The de minimis exemption was originally designed to allow US travelers to bring home gifts and items purchased abroad for personal use without paying duties. But as the ecommerce industry boomed, the rule also made it cheaper and more efficient for Americans to order goods online from around the world. Until this year, overseas sellers often used the trade loophole to send packages directly to US consumers’ doorsteps at very low cost. According to data from US Customs and Border Protection, the US receives 4 million de minimis shipments every day on average.
Some of the biggest beneficiaries of the policy had been Chinese ecommerce platforms like Shein and Temu, which used de minimis shipments systematically to keep prices low and also build supply chains that could respond to consumer demand in real time. They were the first to fall victim to Trump’s tariffs when he issued an executive order in April removing the exemption for packages coming from China.
When the duty-free exemption ended, some analysts feared it would be an extinction-level threat for the Chinese ecommerce sites, but they have learned to adapt and resumed normal operations for the most part. Temu and Shein did, however, raise prices on many products to account for the added costs of the new tariffs.
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