The $800 exemption is gone. Here is what it did to unit economics.

For about eight years, if you imported something into the United States worth less than $800, you paid nothing at the border. More than 1.36 billion parcels came in that way in a single year — over 90% of all inbound cargo by volume.

That ended on 29 August 2025. Executive Order 14324 suspended duty-free de minimis treatment for every country, not just China. CBP made the suspension indefinite by regulation in June 2026, and statutory repeal follows on 1 July 2027.

I still see calculators telling people a $50 parcel arrives duty-free. It does not.

What it does to a real product

Take a private-label product that costs $6 a unit from a supplier in Shenzhen, with freight of about $1.40 a unit on a 500-unit air shipment. Under the old rules, if you shipped it as a low-value consignment, your landed cost was $7.40 and you never thought about customs.

Now every unit is dutiable. Say it is apparel at 12% — apparel duty is genuinely in that range and can run higher depending on fibre content. Duty is charged on the transaction value of the goods, which for the US excludes international freight, so that is $0.72 a unit. Landed cost goes to $8.12.

Ten percent, and it arrives before you have sold a thing, which means it hits cash flow first and margin second.

Footwear is where this gets ugly. US rates on some rubber footwear reach the high thirties. A $6 shoe carrying 37% duty adds $2.22 a unit, and if you priced that product on pre-2025 economics it is now quietly loss-making at volume.

Then there are the tariff actions stacking on top — Section 301, Section 232, the reciprocal measures — which apply to particular origins and commodities on top of the base tariff schedule rate. The base rate alone understates what you owe, sometimes badly.

Why this is bigger than the marketplace fee

Here is the part that surprised me when I started modelling it properly.

On a $30 product selling on Amazon, the referral fee at 15% is $4.50. For a China-sourced physical good, duty plus the freight it displaces frequently exceeds that. The largest single deduction from a seller’s margin is no longer the marketplace — it is the border.

And yet, when we audited nineteen ecommerce profit calculators before building ours, not one of them modelled import duty at all. Every single one asks for a “cost of goods” figure and quietly assumes you have already worked it out. Most sellers I have spoken to put the supplier invoice price in that box.

That is the gap. If your cost of goods field contains the number your supplier invoiced you, your margin is wrong by whatever duty, freight and clearance actually cost — and since August 2025 that is a much bigger number than it used to be.

Getting the order of operations right

Duty and import tax compound, and the sequence matters more than the rates.

For the US it is relatively simple, because there is no federal VAT. Duty on the goods value, and that is the border cost. State sales and use tax may apply at the point of sale, but that is a separate conversation.

Everywhere else, the sequence bites. In the UK: customs value is goods plus freight plus insurance, duty is charged on that, and then 20% VAT is charged on the customs value plus the duty. Calculate the two independently and add them and you will understate the bill.

India stacks three levies in a fixed order: basic customs duty on the CIF value, then a social welfare surcharge calculated at 10% of the duty rather than of the goods, then IGST on the whole accumulated total. Get the order wrong and the answer moves by several percent.

Canada has the most fiddly threshold rules of any major market. Courier shipments from the US and Mexico get CAD 150 duty-free and CAD 40 tax-free. Postal shipments, and shipments from anywhere else, get CAD 20. Same parcel, different answer depending on which network carried it.

Our customs duty calculator applies each country’s own basis and sequence rather than one generic formula, and shows every step so you can check it against your broker’s entry.

What I would actually change

Move duty into cost of goods, not “other costs”. It belongs in the number you calculate margin against, because it is a cost of acquiring saleable inventory. Work out landed cost per unit first on the landed cost calculator, then carry that single figure into your profit model.

Reprice anything sourced from Asia in a high-duty category. Apparel, footwear, textiles and leather goods are the obvious candidates. If you have not touched prices since mid-2025, some of your SKUs are working harder than they look.

Get your commodity codes right before customs does it for you. Duty is set by an eight or ten digit code, not by a product category. “Footwear” spans single digits to the high thirties. Any tool that gives you a precise duty rate from a category dropdown is guessing on your behalf, and you find out at entry.

Decide DDP or DAP deliberately if you sell cross-border to consumers. Under DAP your customer gets a courier invoice before the parcel is released, which is one of the most reliable ways to generate a refund request and a one-star review. DDP costs you the duty but keeps the checkout price final.

What is coming next

The EU is removing its €150 customs duty exemption during 2026, confirmed by the European Commission in November 2025, with an interim calculation method running until mid-2028. Secondary reporting describes that interim method as a small flat duty per parcel from July 2026.

I have deliberately not hardcoded that amount anywhere, because I have not read the Official Journal text and I am not willing to publish a number I cannot source. Our calculator lets you enter it. When the final text is confirmed, that becomes a default and the change gets a date on the sources page.

Which is, more or less, the whole point. On a topic where the rules moved three times in eighteen months, the useful thing is not a number — it is knowing when the number was last checked.

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Every shipment that used to clear under de minimis now needs a paperwork pack behind it. Our sister site ToolsBay can merge a commercial invoice, packing list and certificate of origin into one PDF, and shrink the result when a broker portal caps the upload size. Both run in your browser, so the documents never leave your machine.