I thought I had outsmarted Donald Trump’s tariffs, but I was wrong. Well, at least sort of.
On August 29, the US government officially ended an 87-year-old rule that allowed Americans to import small packages tariff-free. Known as the de minimis exemption, the policy had allowed shipments under a certain value threshold—$800 in recent years—to clear customs without paying any duties. Policymakers have been debating changing de minimis for years, but when it finally happened, the move still sent shock waves through the global ecommerce and shipping industries.
Twelve days before the new rule went into effect, I placed an order on Etsy for a set of custom wooden slats to cover my living room cabinet doors for a more polished look. This is my second time shopping from the same indie seller, so I knew they were based in Ukraine. But I was hoping that I made my purchase early enough to beat the de minimis deadline and save on tariffs. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.
It’s now September, and my package still hasn’t arrived. Denys, the shop owner, explains that my order got caught in a bureaucratic vortex after it was shipped in the days leading up to the end of de minimis, when customs agencies had not yet established clear new procedures for tracking small packages and applying tariffs to them. “Based on what we see, customs may take another week or two to fully adapt,” Denys said on Tuesday.
The total value of the order was less than $40, far below the old de minimis threshold, but thanks to processing disruptions and delays, my package is now subject to Trump’s country-specific tariffs. They’re just 10 percent for goods from Ukraine, and Denys says he’s willing to cover the added costs himself because he wants international customers to remain happy “with Ukrainian brands in general.”
While I personally won’t have to pay more for this specific purchase, the experience underscores a deeper point about the whole de minimis mess: While headlines largely focus on how Trump’s new tariff regime is affecting giants like Amazon, Walmart, Shein, or Temu, those who are feeling the squeeze the most are small foreign business owners like Denys.
Unexpected Winners
In fact, the Chinese ecommerce giants may already have an advantage in this new environment. Since May, Chinese packages have no longer qualified for the de minimis exemption. That means Shein and Temu have had a few months to adjust to the new rules before the Trump administration expanded them to the rest of the world. And it turns out, the elimination of de minimis hasn’t stopped their overall growth: The Chinese publication LatePost reported that global sales for Shein and Temu are higher this year compared to 2024.
Seema Shah, vice president of research and insights at Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, says that Temu and Shein slashed their US advertising spending by 87 percent and 27 percent, respectively, in the second quarter of 2025 (when the new tariffs went into effect) compared to the first quarter of the year. Paid marketing has been especially important for Temu and Shein because they face higher user churn rates than their American competitors. But if they doubted their US business could stay profitable in face of the new trade policies, why would they spend money trying to acquire more users here? “Business-wise, that makes sense. There’s no point in spending money when you're in the news in a negative way,” Shah says.