A few years ago, I found the perfect rug for my daughter’s room. It had pink unicorns and flowers. But I scoffed at the price tag on Anthropologie’s website: more than $1,000, plus an additional fee for “white glove delivery.” Then I fired up Etsy. I found a similar product made by a workshop in India that shipped directly from there. It took weeks to arrive, but it was half the price.
Online shopping is a miracle: You can find items of any kind, fit for any purpose, for affordable prices—and shipped from all over the world to your door. But as of today, buying from international sellers has become more expensive. That’s because President Donald Trump ended the de minimis exemption on imported goods, a loophole that allowed millions of daily packages to enter the country without paying duties. The exemption has been around for a long time—nearly a century—but it took on new import (get it?) in 2016, when the maximum value for untaxed goods rose from $200 to $800. In that moment, the social-media-driven rise of direct-to-consumer e-commerce, drop-shipping, and online-marketplace sales were also accelerating. Ever since, American ports, mailboxes, and homes have been flooded with cheap clothing, electronics, accessories, skin-care products, toys, and a host of other consumer goods.
The de minimis loophole is a big reason e-commerce sites including Shein and Temu could sell you things for so cheap: They shipped straight from China, skirting any tariffs. The White House ended the exemption for goods from China earlier this year, and now de minimis is ending for all countries. That means that many things you might import could become more expensive (on account of the additional taxes) or harder to buy (because sellers won’t bother shipping to the U.S.), or take longer to arrive (because of customs backlogs), or any combination of those. The rug I bought a few years ago would now be subject to a 50 percent import duty, when you factor in tariffs on India. Presuming that cost is passed down to consumers, it’s enough to give a buyer like me pause.
You might not realize how much of the stuff you buy online comes directly from overseas. I didn’t, until I looked closely at my buying habits over the past few years. After all, sites such as Etsy and eBay offer seamless global commerce: A handmade craft object could come from Maine or Myanmar, straight to you. Even Amazon has benefited from de minimis. Various strategies have allowed the retailer’s marketplace suppliers to take advantage of de minimis when they import goods; at other times, when you buy from the big platforms’ sites, those vendors might ship what you ordered directly from abroad, tax free.
Buying cheap, imported goods has become the best part of online shopping: Not only can you find the best deals from international sellers, but also you can source items to satiate specific hobbies and interests—say, drafting pens from Japan or instrument reeds from Belgium. I found that I had bought a host of stuff, on Etsy and beyond, that took advantage of de mininis, including rubber-tree hippo figurines from Denmark (naturally) and a surprise mandolin from Ireland for my daughter. Those goods would now be subject to an additional tariff. I’ve bought incredibly cheap Chinese- and Japanese-manufactured camera lenses that have fueled a resurgence of photography hobbyism for me and my son; I also bought a detailed and shockingly high-quality Paul Revere costume to help a neighbor’s kid beat her classmates in a school costume contest—a small thing, but one we’ll all remember.
Ah, and then the British faucet doodad. This was a big deal. When I tried to repurpose an old, turn-of-the century washbasin with separate hot and cold water spigots, I couldn’t find a faucet that fit the sink. Sure enough, some vendor in the United Kingdom had a $30 plastic tube that did the trick. International sellers sometimes are the only ones that have what you need, and you don’t need to be a particularly adept shopper to find them. A simple Google search will suffice.
Of course, being able to seamlessly import cheap stuff has also encouraged mindless consumerism. Some imported goods are crap that nobody ever needed, produced at unconscionable labor and environmental costs. My family has a bit of a LEGO habit, and my son took to buying the cheaper, Chinese knockoff sets to maximize our, well, brick-building value, I suppose. It felt a little suspect to do this—the sets are direct copies of LEGO designs—and many of them remain in bags in a closet, unbuilt. Surely we didn’t need to import those. Nor the piles of cables, chargers, head lamps, and other low-cost electronic goods that broke after a few uses.
Whether it’s junk or not, Americans have become acclimated to buying a prodigious variety of wares from all over the world. When de minimis fused with global online commerce a decade ago, ordinary buyers like you and me started to see behind the curtain of domestic retailers. Anthropologie’s website touted that the unicorn rug was “exclusive” to its store. But that was never entirely true: Sellers offering the same style with similar materials found a way to reach buyers like me directly, thanks to online commerce and its associated marketplaces. That’s not going to change anytime soon. Instead, buying things will just become more painful. Someone will bear the burden of the new duties, and that someone is likely to be you.
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