Will your Shein and Temu hauls get more expensive because of Trump’s new China tariffs? And will you get them at all?
On February 2, US President Donald Trump announced an extra 10% tariff on goods from China.
So when you send your Shein order to a freight forwarder in Miami like Mailpac or RocketShip, will you have to pay that extra 10-percent?
Based on our research, you might! But there are ways to avoid it.
If you’ve been on SHEIN or Temu this week, you might have seen them prompting you to order from their US warehouses. Those items get delivered faster, and they won’t have the customs duty because they’re not coming from China.
By the way, customs, duty, tariffs, import tax - those words all mean the same thing.
But what I’ve been trying to figure out is, if I order something from China and ship it to my Mailpac address, would it be taxed in the US before it gets sent to Jamaica? And if so, who would pay that tax?
Or would it be exempt, since the item is not staying in the US?
We spoke to one customs expert in Jamaica who explained that it may indeed be taxed in the US, because the item has to be cleared before it's sent to the recipient.
And if it is taxed in the US, the recipient would have to pay that tax in order to collect the item. The recipient in the US being your freight forwarder. Who would then likely pass that cost on to you, the customer, when it gets to Jamaica.
We also spoke to Khary Robinson, Executive Chairman of Norbrook Equity Partners, which owns MailPac. He said they’re still getting clarity, but he believes there will be an exemption for licensed freight forwarders.
That word “licensed” is key, because most of your faves aren’t licensed - but me nah call no name. Many of these US shipping addresses are really just somebody auntie house.
Now for a minute, it seemed like we might not get our packages at all. USPS had temporarily suspended incoming shipments from China and Hong Kong, but they reversed that the next day.
And let me add a little more context here.
What Trump signed is an executive order removing China’s “de minimis” exemption. Under this rule, anything worth less than US$800 could be imported into the United States duty free and without even an inspection.
Now $800 is a lot! Jamaica’s “de minimis” is only US$100. Remember it was just raised from $50 last year.
With such a high de minimis, Trump thinks Americans don’t have an incentive to buy American-made goods, when they can just order from China duty-free. Imagine if our “de minimis” was $800. Local business dead!
We already saw the impact of the increase to $100 this Christmas. I went to Halfway Tree Christmas Eve evening and there were no crowds, no lines, easy parking. I was like well this is weird. I was planning to spend several hours. Got through in 15 minutes. I spoke to a couple store owners who said it’s been like that ever since the threshold increase.
So I raise that just to say, I see where Trump’s coming from. Americans shipped 2 million packages A DAY from China last year! Eliminating that $800 exemption will encourage people to buy local.
But it will also increase the price of many things for Americans, and by extension, us in the Caribbean.
Now after two days of researching this story, right as I was about to hit record, I got an alert that Trump has delayed the tariffs on China, because it was pure chaos at UPS and them trying to figure out how to implement it. I can’t keep up with this man!
And that’s the bottom line.
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