This Saturday marks one year since the United States suspended the de minimis exemption for imports from every country. For almost a decade, shipments under $800 entered the country duty-free with minimal paperwork, and an entire model of ecommerce was built on that loophole: manufacture abroad, ship parcels one at a time to American doorsteps, undercut everyone holding inventory onshore.
That model has spent a year dying. The suspension took effect August 29, 2025, and the exemption is scheduled to be terminated outright on July 1, 2027 under last year's budget law. Small parcels now clear customs with duties that can add double-digit dollar amounts to items that retail for less than a dinner.
The year's scoreboard
The clearest loser was the direct-from-factory parcel model. When a $10 item picks up more than its own price in duties and brokerage, the math that made it viable stops existing.
The winners were less obvious a year ago:
- Brands already holding inventory in US warehouses, whose landed costs were locked at the container level and whose checkout prices did not change overnight.
- Bulk importation over parcel importation. Duties on a container spread across thousands of units beat duties assessed parcel by parcel, in both dollars and customs delays.
- Brands that price duties honestly on their remaining cross-border sales, collecting them at checkout instead of surprising customers at the door.
- Domestic fulfillment infrastructure generally. Onshore warehousing went from cost center to moat.
What this means for your brand
If you sell into the US, the playbook the last year wrote is short: import in bulk, hold inventory in the US, and fulfill domestically. That is the model our warehouse in central Ohio runs for DTC brands every day, with receiving, storage, and 24-hour order processing under one roof.
Selling outward from the US got more complicated too. The EU agreed in December to a per-item customs charge on low-value parcels starting mid-2026, and other markets are studying the same move. The era of pretending borders are free is over in both directions. On international orders, delivered-duty-paid shipping through our FlavorCloud-powered international program collects duties at checkout, so your customer in London or Toronto never gets a ransom note from a courier.
A year into this new world, the brands still treating customs as a surprise are funding the ones that treat it as a line item. If your landed-cost math still lives in a spreadsheet from 2024, we should talk.
FAQ
My products are made overseas. Does domestic fulfillment still help?
Yes. Importing in bulk means duties are assessed once, at freight economics, with proper brokerage. Fulfilling those units domestically afterward keeps every customer delivery a domestic shipment with no per-parcel customs exposure.
What is delivered-duty-paid and why does it matter now?
DDP means duties and taxes are calculated and collected when your customer checks out, and the shipment clears customs prepaid. Post-de-minimis, unpaid duties are the top reason international packages get refused, and refused packages are the most expensive kind you can ship.