News from the import front.
6But not good news.
A business acquaintance whose line of merch can only be produced in China had been ordering stock from a supplier in the UK that had some licensed designs that he didn’t want as bootlegs. This merch ships from a UK warehouse. He’d been keeping his per-order volume low enough to stay under the $800 de minimus exemption for not-China, but today the paperwork was presented to him for an invoice with a value of US$792, and it was accompanied by a tariff assessment of over US$1300 that had to be paid before the merch could be released in the UK for delivery here on the 5th. The merch is too high-cubage to be viable for air freight. Apparently, shippers and carriers in more than just China are seeking to avoid having unpaid shipments get stuck.
I think we now have one answer about how the tariffs are going to work. Chinese goods arriving by international post are going to have the minimum $!00 tariff applied if the value of the item is below the equivalent ad-valorem rate (about $85), and will shift to the percentage-on-top calculation when the tariff will exceed $100.
It has been noted that a large percentage of Temu sellers have tripled their prices in recent weeks. Apparently, this is being done as they anticipate the date on which their bulk import and redirect partners in the US have to remit the tariffs before splitting the shipments for dispatch to the buyers. Those goods won’t get hit by the $100 minimum. But Temu does not specify which sellers might not be using their aggregation services (or are using a different one), so it’s still a crapshoot as to whether it’s “safe” to order anything there. Many eBay sellers routinely rely on HKPost to handle their parcels, and have already deleted their listings to avoid a firestorm of negatives next month. I doubt that most of those will be back until the de minimus exemption is reinstated.
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I’m so confused on all this. Can your order something from temu for like $25 and not pay a tariff fee? Or do you pay one no matter what you order now?
@Star2236 I think that Temu has built the tarriffs into their pricing now, and I think they are paying them from your sales amount, at the bulk rate, as the aggregated shipments arrive for final-destination distribution. But I do not know this for certain, and they have not confirmed if this is the case, so the level of risk is presently unknown to me.
@Star2236 This is the closest thing to an answer that I could get from them.
@Star2236
Your best bet is probably to read the (current) TEMU terms and conditions legalese to see who is responsible for duty/tarriff etc. Prepare to have your eyes glaze over!
(I believe having the tariff “pre-paid” would require the shipper to handle the tariff paperwork/payment for the buyer with money supplied by the seller… which gets complicated)
BTW the above quote from TEMU looks like they will notify you of the anticipated charge but I see no indication that they will actually collect it.
As of when I looked at their site this morning, Temu had zero ship-from-China items available to purchase for US shoppers. Everything on the page had their “Local” flag set.
Shein is taking orders, but they aren’t saying anything about tarriff issues, so that’s probably a no-fly zone.
AliExpress appears to be doing the “US Shipper only” thing, with wild variations in price levels and with LOADS of high-shipping gotchas.
One of my wholesale suppliers whose merch comes only from China has announced that two of their four showrooms are now closed, and as inventory depletes, they will be collapsing their operations back to their L.A. warehouse. I expect that it will also close when the stock gets low enough.
I didn’t look at Wish; I regard them as an afterthought at this point.
Shein has updated their site to explicitly state that their prices include the tariffs, and it warns that any demands for payment of any kind at delivery are false.
@werehatrack
That would make sense if they were using US local products only as well. Do you know if that’s the case?
(… not that I’ve ever used any of those 4 ‘services’…)
@chienfou It appears that it’s a China-heavy mix of stuff imported prior to the announcement of the tariffs, with a mix of some non-China which will likely consstitute an increasing percentage of the items available as the China-merch sellers run dry. Some of those sellers are already showing holes in their stock; limited size and color selection where that’s a factor, etc.
Oops.
Was gonna comment.
But wrong forum topic. (Too political)
So
/giphy ouch!
I reluctantly canceled my pledge yesterday on a Kickstarter project because it’s shipping from Hong Kong in June. The product just isn’t worth anything close to 145% more than my pledge. I doubt I’m alone for this particular project and for many other CN/HK projects being funded on platforms like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Inventors and designers are suffering or will suffer a lot from the tariffs and some ideas won’t ever come to fruition because of the tariffs.
@ItalianScallion Out of curiosity is the Kickstarter for a titanium inf pen?
@yakkoTDI It’s a portable espresso maker.
@yakkoTDI I also funded a CD player that is a Hong Kong-based project. I just sent the developers a message asking how they’re planning to handle the tariffs. Shipping via another country won’t work because the tariff is on goods made in CN/HK and not just shipped from CN/HK.
@ItalianScallion @yakkoTDI OK I want the espresso maker. But I and also my brother-in law fellow coffee-fiend now use some sort of camping vehicle with at least 12V and sometimes 120V available. So the ideas of backpacking to 14000 ft at the top of a mountain to make coffee are probably memories of the past. Still seems cool, though. Or hot, I suppose.
@pmarin @yakkoTDI There are lots of portable espresso makers out there that are nearly indistinguishable from each other. The common characterists of them are
I see lots of them advertised on Instagram. Mine is Outin brand and has an internal rechargeable battery. The one this project is developing (the HiBREW H4C) uses three ordinary rechargeable batteries that look to be AA size; that’s why I wanted it.
I know no one wants to read this whole thing for De Minimis
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48380
But basically it was set up as a low level exemption in the 1930s and congress kept increasing it till today so no tariffs on shipped individual goods below x dollars from some countries. Couple hundred dollars. That’s how temu and allibaba and shein. Functioned. Should be $800 for china. So anything you order. Other than a car
I have issues with their labor practices probably. But
Trump revoked it via executive order, which is illegal because its a law. He can only enforce the law. But his tariffs are also illegal. Tariffs are not included in his made up emergency. But that’s been coming for a few weeks. People should be aware…
No one seems to be paying attention or care. But yes all those cheap imports via DHL or straight mail are going to be gone. That one in particular… We were importing junk so. IDK how I feel about that one. Especially shein… Disposable clothing…
But also at the same time stuff can’t be made here so. It will be interesting how people react to something they have taken advantage of for a long time and didn’t expect. Even though it’s been broadcast for months
@unksol Reshoring has had to happen for at least the last couple of decades, likely longer, yet never has with most of the past administrations. Instead, it has been continually accelerating in the opposite direction. It is getting to the point now that the US is only capable of fully manufacturing a very small proportion of consumer goods, essential industrial, infrastructural and even basic medical supplies, not to mention almost everything else we use daily. Even minor disruptions of the global supply chain during Covid really brought some of these deficiencies to the surface. Continuing that trend on top of our country’s general educational decline would ensure that we lose any ability to internally reverse course in the future.
While we may not agree with how everything is being done right now, there has to be a start and it needs to progress at a much more rapid pace than has ever been before if we want to have some semblance of a recovery within the lifetimes of those who still possess and can pass on some of the key knowledge that will be essential for the next generations. Will there be significant pains? Yes. Will it hurt even more if we don’t act fast? Undoubtedly!
KuoH
@kuoh yea… No we don’t. Need to onshore production of waste that no one can make a living on… That’s not happening. Anything "brought back " is going to be automated. And we had historically low unemployment. It’s not going to work out that way.
@unksol Sure, we may not need all the low value gadgets that are being imported right now, but the redevelopment of a solid manufacturing base that is capable of sourcing available raw materials and producing diverse products of all sizes and categories is still very much necessary. Yes, there will likely be some automation, especially in the low value products sectors, but to assume that everything can and will be automated is too simplistic, as the alternative would be to do nothing and continue accelerating the decline.
There are many other high value or critical products such as utility power transformers for one, which are currently on a backlog of more than 3 years because we no longer have the ability to rely primarily on internal production, thus little capability to support existing demands and completely unable to scale up in the case of disasters. I believe Helene alone took out nearly 5000 transformers, not to mention other related equipment reliant on foreign production. And this is just a single example out of many that the large scale offshoring of our manufacturing industry has led to.
Will things turn around completely during this administration? Not likely. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort just to reduce the momentum built up over the past many decades, but I’m not keen on just keeping my foot on the accelerator and the steering wheel locked pointed towards the edge of the cliff.
KuoH
@kuoh I don’t disagree on critical infrastructure or other industries. You don’t get there putting blanket terriffs. You get there supporting industry and education and well paying jobs in those sectors. Which are being cut alongside terrifs. And treaties for required resources. Not consumer goods.
Idk if you noticed that large infrastructure bill that was passed a few years ago to do that? Even if you think terriffs would help they would be targeted to stear that investment, not slapped across the board for litteraly no reason
@kuoh and just a side note. We have a large servives industry that they are not factoring into terriffs. And companies are trying to constantly offshore. That’s something that we currently have with our extremely low unemployment numbers. So if we were going to start somewhere it should be make sure we keep what we have and make it better. Not worse