One day after US president Donald Trump’s new tariffs on Chinese imports kicked into effect, shipping companies have already started charging higher import duties and processing fees, bewildering American consumers. Over the past 24 hours, US shoppers have reported receiving notices from UPS and DHL stating they owed between $20 to over $50. Some small business owners, meanwhile, say the new fees are forcing them to temporarily halt sending orders to the US completely.
“I am now stuck with $30,000 of items I can’t move across the border, the lifeblood of my business,” says Leslie Brown, the owner of a Canadian secondhand clothing company that sells to US shoppers on eBay and Poshmark. Yesterday, Brown published a blog post on Medium titled “Donald Trump Will Kill My Business.”
US customers who placed orders on shopping websites like the popular Chinese fast-fashion platform Shein have been particularly impacted, even if they made their purchases long before the tariffs were announced. They are now forced to either pay hefty fees—in some cases, more than the value of the items inside—or have their packages sent back.
Chardonnay Love, an artist from Pennsylvania, says she received a text message from DHL on Tuesday explaining that she needed to pay $26.20 in import duties to get a Shein order that already cost her $267.14. The package was shipped from Guangzhou, China, and arrived at a customs office in Cincinnati on Tuesday, according to DHL tracking records she shared with WIRED. They show Love’s order was put on hold for several hours, during which she received the notice asking her to pay the import duties. DHL also noted the package would be returned in five days if she declined to do so.
Love bought the items from Shein back on January 27, days before Trump signed an executive order placing a new 10 percent tariff on Chinese goods sent to the US. “If I don’t get the items, this would ruin my Valentine’s Day. But being that I already paid shipping and for the items, I’m kind of stubbornly unwilling to pay this weak-ass tariff,” she tells WIRED.
Other people in the US have reported similar experiences. On Facebook, Reddit, and other social media sites, users said they were being charged similar amounts to receive their Shein purchases or those from other retailers. One person shared screenshots of DHL’s breakdown of the costs, which showed that the majority of the fees they were being asked to pay were going toward processing costs, rather than tariffs themselves.
Shein, DHL, FedEx, UPS, and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment from WIRED.
Trump’s executive order not only raised tariffs on Chinese goods but also eliminated a long-standing trade exemption that allowed smaller packages to be sent from China to the US duty-free, so long as their value was less than $800. As of Tuesday, shoppers, small businesses, and ecommerce websites now need to account for the 10 percent additional tariff as well as routine import duties applied to different categories of items, plus processing and brokering fees. The abrupt changes have thrown the online shopping industry into chaos as sellers, shipping companies, customs brokers, and consumers scramble to figure out how to absorb the new costs.
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.
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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.