When President Trump announced tariffs this month on goods from all over the world, Jing and Eddie Levine, who sell party supplies on Amazon, were on a flight home to Chicago after visiting suppliers in Asia.
Amazon was the center of their life. They met at a conference for Amazon sellers in 2016 and had their first kiss at another Amazon conference two years later. They moved in together and grew their business, Treasures Gifted. When they married in 2022, they threw an Amazon-themed wedding, with guests assigned Amazon product numbers instead of table numbers.
The Levines tried to make sense of the news. The giant poster that Mr. Trump pointed to during a Rose Garden ceremony on April 2 showed that China would be hit with large tariffs, but so would every country they had just visited — and almost every country on the planet, for that matter.
“Thank God the Wi-Fi on the plane was not bad this time,” Mr. Levine said, “because I would have had a heart attack.”
The balloons, plates and decorations that the Levines import are just a speck in the trillions of dollars in goods that swirl around the globe. A week after Mr. Trump announced his so-called reciprocal tariffs, he pulled them back for most countries for at least 90 days, while sending tariffs on China even higher.
Countries or major companies may be able to lobby the president for a break, as he seemed to give Apple and other electronics makers over the weekend. But the best the Levines of the world can do is wait for news updates and hope their plans haven’t been shredded by Mr. Trump’s vision for unraveling decades of global trade. And like thousands of other small-business owners who sell online, the Levines are struggling to adapt to an e-commerce system that let them tap into international markets but that is now on the verge of falling apart.
More than 60 percent of all items sold on Amazon are offered by third-party sellers. By some estimates, most of the largest are based in China, though there are still thousands of small and medium-size sellers in the United States.
Many companies are in the middle of forecasting demand for the holiday shopping season. “You are pretty much placing the orders to your factories right now,” said Guru Hariharan, who advises major brands at his company, CommerceIQ. Even with the 90-day pause for countries besides China, planning for Christmas is a crapshoot because many orders would ship after that window, if businesses can snag space on a container ship.
Some sellers have received emails from Amazon asking them to share if they plan to shift suppliers or raise prices, but the Levines have not heard anything.
The Levines, both 36, import their products from Asia — many from China, and the rest from other countries they have declined to name in order to avoid tipping off competitors. If wide-ranging tariffs persist, they plan to raise prices, they said. Finding domestic sources is not simple because U.S. manufacturers don’t cater to the small custom orders they need, the couple added.
Billions of paper plates — crucial to a party-supply business — are produced in the United States each year in automated factories. But the Levines say they don’t need the generic plates American suppliers produce.
The couple primarily run the business from their apartment, and they have four full-time employees, including Ms. Levine’s parents, at their warehouse in the Chicago suburbs. Ms. Levine started the e-commerce business in 2013 and eventually settled on selling party supplies, because she thought they had potential to expand to a variety of products — balloons, napkins, plates, photo backdrops, plastic cupcake toppers.
They sell hundreds of thousands of items a year, often around certain themes. Some are based on characters they license, like a princess-y “Once Upon a Time” design featuring Peppa Pig. Others they design on their own, like friendly dinosaurs with pink bows for a child’s birthday, or a “touchdown” set for the Super Bowl.
The Levines knew tariffs were coming, but did not expect them to be so rapid, so large and so widespread.
A week after the tariffs were announced, Ms. Levine spent an hour on the phone with a manufacturer. They discussed canceling production of the last items needed to fill a container in China that was almost ready to go, and delaying another filled with paper plates from elsewhere in Asia.
“We ended the call with ‘Let’s check in again the next morning,’” she said.
About an hour later, Ms. Levine sent Mr. Levine a screenshot of a CNN headline: “Trump orders 90-day pause on new tariffs except for China.”
“Yayy,” she texted. “We get one last meal before getting on the electric chair.”
Amazon sales make up much of the couple’s business, and those orders are fulfilled by workers at Amazon’s warehouses. The Levines’ staff and family pack their direct orders.
One of their most important products — paper plates — gave them a head start on managing their business through a trade war. That’s because that item was the target of a trade dispute of its own.
In January 2024, six of the seven companies that manufacture paper plates in the United States accused factories in China, Vietnam and Thailand of dumping cheap products in the United States, in violation of fair trade laws.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, nearly all paper plates used in the United States were produced domestically, said Adam Gordon, the lawyer at the Bristol Group who represented the U.S. factories in the matter.
But the pandemic scrambled supply chains and demand. Factories shut down. Consumers ate in, and mills shifted to making paperboard for to-go boxes. China eventually stepped in to fill the production void.
“No one denies there was a need,” Mr. Gordon said. But as the pandemic receded, the importers wouldn’t give ground. “To defend their market share,” he said, “the imports used low and increasingly lower prices to retain sales.”
Mr. Gordon filed cases on behalf of the manufacturers — including the Finnish multinational that produces Chinet, and Dart, which makes the Solo brand — claiming unfair pricing and subsidies with the Commerce Department and the U.S. International Trade Commission. None of the companies responded to a request to comment.
A yearlong investigation found that the U.S. producers had been “materially injured” by improper imports.
It found that U.S. factories produced almost 50 billion paper plates in 2023, but they had the capacity to make 32 billion more. The domestic industry employed almost 5,000 workers, who made close to $23 an hour.
The United States imposed duties of up to 504 percent on Chinese paper plates, with lower duties on exports from Vietnam and Thailand.
The change was a blow, but the Levines could plan for it. They tried to find factories in other countries and in the United States. But it was not easy.
Yes, American manufacturers make tons of paper plates, Ms. Levine said, but they typically produce bulk orders: uncoated beige plates for a ballpark or the generic squiggly prints found at Costco. Ms. Levine said she could not find a domestic supplier to take the small orders she needed to be able to dabble in different branded designs.
The case amounted to “14 months of hell,” Ms. Levine said. The Levines’ business moved more than half its production out of China and into other countries in Southeast Asia, but some of them were being investigated as well. The Levines didn’t want to bring in more plates, because the final duties could be retroactive.
With the new duties pending, the Levines spent most of last month in Asia, looking for new providers.
They visited a dozen cities in four countries and were struck by how many Chinese manufacturers had set up shop in other countries. “This was not done overnight,” Mr. Levine said. “You’re talking about moving families over, moving equipment over, starting whole operations, hiring new people locally.”
The Levines have been going through their catalog item by item to see if they can source anything in the United States, or even buy machines to make some products themselves.
“Either we wouldn’t be able to produce the volume to support the demand,” Mr. Levine said, “or it would cost potentially five, six, seven, 10 times the cost, so you’re risking pricing yourself out of the market.”
Mr. Levine said he had asked managers in every Asian factory they visited why U.S. production was not competitive.
“Only if they agree to work 12 hours a day, which is what most of them are doing,” he said of workers in the Asian factories. “They are making a wage of about $16 a day. Find me anyone in the U.S. willing to do that job.”
Just as the Levines felt they had a plan for dealing with the antidumping measures, the president’s tariffs hit. “The anti-dumping, there’s a process for it,” Mr. Levine said. “It takes a long time. That wasn’t easy. But it’s not change based on the commander in chief’s attitude on a morning.”
The Levines are holding off on moving their completed products scattered around China into a container ready to ship, and their supplier is nervous. “They are scared we are going to abandon the order, and we are scared they are going to liquidate it,” Ms. Levine said.
They have talked with a freight broker about getting their other container out of the other Asian country, which they declined to name. But finding a slot on a ship became difficult as companies scrambled to import goods from outside China while the tariffs on other countries were on hold.
“They are inundated with requests,” Mr. Levine said. “The answer is like: ‘I got it. We’ll get back to you.’”
Karen Weise writes about technology and is based in Seattle. Her coverage focuses on Amazon and Microsoft, two of the most powerful companies in America.
The post They Sell Party Supplies on Amazon. New Tariffs Threaten Their Future. appeared first on New York Times.
