Adhering to the new rules is also proving to be a major lift for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the US Postal Service, the latter of which briefly stopped accepting packages from China and Hong Kong altogether on Tuesday as it scrambled to manage the deluge of packages from China that were suddenly subjected to more thorough inspections.
CBP published guidance on Wednesday warning the public that packages sent from China to the US must now be submitted for “formal entry,” a process that involves providing extensive documentation, including about the value of the parcel’s contents and comes with higher processing fees.
Got a Tip?
Do you work at Shein, Temu, or another ecommerce company and have insight into what’s going on? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter via email at zeyi_yang@wired.com or on Signal at @zeyiyang.06.
For now, it seems like shipping companies are shouldering the bulk of the burden created by the new trade rules, and not all of them are happy about it. In response to Trump’s tariffs, two logistics carriers, DHL Hong Kong and the Hongkong Post, have announced they will no longer accept individual packages shipped to the United States. The owner of a trucking company based in Alberta, Canada told WIRED that he plans to pay for the duties out of pocket first and charge clients afterwards.
The elimination of the $800 duty-free exemption is expected to hit Chinese low-cost shopping platforms like Shein and Temu the hardest, but many smaller ecommerce sellers have also felt the burn. Brands selling mechanical keyboards, underwear, and tea have all notified their customers of potential shipment pauses and price increases in response to the tariffs, according to screenshots shared on Reddit.
Miguel Schraeder, owner of a Canadian boardgame accessory company, says several of his customers have been asked by UPS to pay for heavy import duties for products made in China. His company sources products from Chinese manufacturers, but ships them out of Canada. Still, they have been slapped with surprise import duties.
In one example Schraeder shared with WIRED, the customer placed a $30 order on Friday before the tariffs were announced and has now been asked by UPS to pay $52.22 to receive the package, which is over 170 percent of the item’s original price.
He says that until the new tariffs were into effect, he always shipped packages to US customers duty-free. He actually encouraged his customers to place orders before last weekend to try to avoid the charge, but still ended up getting hit with fees.
Schraeder says he talked to his usual contact at UPS, who told him that there are hundreds of thousands of packages being held up for the same reason. “It sounds like they don’t have the system set up in place yet to properly handle this,” Schraeder says, referring specifically to UPS’s ground shipping system. “They are just charging everyone the equivalent [fees] as if it was an $800 item. That’s probably why people are being charged such high fees on such low cost items…They did mention they are looking at fixing that but they’re not promising anything.”
Schraeder expects to lose money from this chaos because customers can refuse to pay the import fees and have the items returned at the seller’s expense. As a result, he plans to temporarily suspend sales to the US.
One complicating factor for some small business owners is that Trump’s tariffs target the original country where products were manufactured, which means it doesn’t matter if items produced in China have been sitting in another country for years before reaching the US. “My problem is that used clothing often has the label missing, or illegible,” says Brown, the secondhand clothing business owner.
Like many other people, Brown says his packages were turned away at the US-Canadian border on Tuesday. He can file for formal entry and try shipping the products to the US again, but he says it will cost too much money and time. “For the immediate future I’m pulling all made-in-China items off and placing my platforms in vacation mode to prevent sales. It’s extreme, but the only fair choice for my customers, I feel,” he says.
