Spoiler alert: There hasn’t been any noticeable reaction yet. You might expect to see price increases or higher order volumes when searching for items like the ESP32, but that hasn’t been the case so far.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the potential impact of removing the de minimis threshold on shipments. It’s hard to imagine how the postal system could efficiently handle tariffs on a dozen small $1 packages from AliExpress landing in the mailbox. I suspect we’re moving beyond that point, with private companies likely clearing these shipments in bulk before they reach USPS—if they even make it that far.
> It’s hard to imagine how the postal system could efficiently handle tariffs on a dozen small $1 packages from AliExpress landing in the mailbox.
De minimis in Canada has been $20 (and sorta $40) for a loooong time. That's like US$14 these days.
Usually brokers and brokered shipments (like UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc) will charge any and every tax/duty absolutely correctly. Possibly charging you more than the cost of the item to calculate all that. And notoriously delivering the parcel and mailing you a bill 2 weeks later. Virtually every Canadian that shops online has some horror story about it.
For stuff coming by post and directly assessed by customs, they used to be sticklers and assess charges on everything worth >$20, even if it's $2.60 in taxes and a $8.95 fee for the privilege of calculating it. In the last ~15 years, they pick and choose.
They seem to ignore China stuff since it's mostly low value and have a sharp eye to spot stuff from, e.g. Japan that's probably higher value.
No idea how Aliexpress and others that use gig workers for last-mile delivery do it. Maybe they just pay the tariffs/taxes because the item value is still low once you exclude the final delivery costs from the valuation.
As a maker of open source hardware, I and others in the US selling my projects stocked up before the de minimis threshold was eliminated on May 2. We're not increasing our prices until those stocks run out and we have to reorder - we don't want to screw the community over.
>We're not increasing our prices until those stocks run out and we have to reorder - we don't want to screw the community over.
That's a nice thing to do, but it might be more sustainable to increase the cost some now, so that you don't have to increase it as much to cover the tariffs in the future.
That's a very uncharitable way to put things. Since my original posts it looks like things have cooled and the worst of the tariffs have been walked back, but at the sky-high tariff rates from before today, my options would have been:
- Raise prices to account for tariffs.
- Not raise prices, therefore not make any profit, therefore not make it worth my time, therefore not make any hardware at all.
I'm not operating at big margins but I do make a profit because I want to balance supporting the community and keeping things at a sustainable level for my sanity. Those tariffs would have wiped those margins out completely.
Re de minimis I imagine suppliers instead of sending lots of $1 packages from Asia will send 1000 x $1 items to some bloke in the US who will send them on, so it will be one import transaction. And quite likely sent from somewhere near China like Vietnam to try to avoid too much tariff.
I like closing the loophole, but the overall turbulence seems to have made many sellers just turn off US sales. I had sourced an off-the-shelf part for our product, so cheap that I wouldn't mind paying 300%, but I can't see the page on AliExpress unless I change my VPN origin.
Spoiler alert: There hasn’t been any noticeable reaction yet. You might expect to see price increases or higher order volumes when searching for items like the ESP32, but that hasn’t been the case so far.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the potential impact of removing the de minimis threshold on shipments. It’s hard to imagine how the postal system could efficiently handle tariffs on a dozen small $1 packages from AliExpress landing in the mailbox. I suspect we’re moving beyond that point, with private companies likely clearing these shipments in bulk before they reach USPS—if they even make it that far.