On July 24, 2026, duty treatment for low-value parcels entering the United States changed for the third time in eleven months. The Section 122 import surcharge hit its 150-day statutory ceiling and expired. Within the hour, USTR’s Section 301 forced-labor tariffs replaced it across 60 economies. The same day, CBP switched on a new postal informal entry process.

Three regimes, eleven months. If you run a large brokerage, you have people tracking this. If you’re a small importer moving 400 units a month, you probably found out when an invoice arrived.

A quick recap, because the headlines stopped early

The $800 de minimis exemption went first for China and Hong Kong on May 2, 2025, then globally on August 29, 2025. A tiered flat-rate option ran alongside it: $80, $160 or $200 per package, depending on the origin country’s effective rate. That option was scheduled to lapse on February 28, 2026, but it was terminated four days early, after the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs on February 20. The de minimis suspension itself survived, re-founded on a different legal basis.

Then came the 10% Section 122 surcharge, which ran until it expired by operation of law on July 23. Now Section 301 forced-labor rates of 10% or 12.5% apply. No ceiling, no expiry date.

The volume story got told badly

You’ll see “postal traffic to the US fell 81%” quoted almost everywhere. The figure is real and it came from the Universal Postal Union. But it measures a single Friday, August 29, 2025, against the Friday before it. It’s a snapshot of the moment the switch flipped, not a sustained decline. I’d rather a supply chain audience knew that than repeat it as a durable number.

What’s better established: 88 postal operators had suspended some or all US-bound services by early September 2025. Most resumed in waves through 2026. Japan Post, one of the last major holdouts, came back in April.

And the parcels themselves didn’t disappear. CBP processed more than 246 million formerly duty-free parcels and collected over $1 billion in duties by December 15, 2025, which is the most recent official figure I’ve been able to find. Set that against roughly 1.36 billion de minimis shipments in FY2024 and the shape becomes clearer. The flow continued. It just got more expensive and slower to clear.

What small importers actually did

Here the evidence is thinner than the confident commentary suggests, and I think it’s worth saying so plainly. There is no representative survey of small importer behavior after the suspension. Several widely recycled statistics come from a tariff survey fielded in April 2025, months before the global change, which doesn’t evidence anything about de minimis at all.

The best quantitative work I’ve found is a working paper using Etsy transaction data, which found an 18% weekly decline in non-US seller sales that persisted over five months. US sellers picked up some of that demand, but not enough to offset the loss. A net contraction rather than a reallocation. One marketplace, one category, so treat it accordingly.

Everything else is qualitative, and it points one direction: forwarders describing customer migration out of direct cross-border parcel into US-based bulk and fulfillment, and freighter capacity repositioning from ecommerce parcel lanes into general cargo.

The obligation nobody priced in

Here’s the part I think matters most for capacity planning.

The low-value parcel was never really a shipping method. It was a compliance category, and a generous one. Take it away and the small importer inherits three obligations that used to sit somewhere else entirely: tariff classification to ten digits, country-of-origin substantiation, and a monthly duty payment cycle. Under the postal informal entry process live since July 24, that means filing monthly spreadsheets with HTSUS classifications and paying through Pay.gov by the 7th.

Most sellers moving a few hundred units a month had none of those capabilities in 2024. Some built them. Some bought them from a broker. And plenty made the problem go away by moving to domestic wholesalers instead, which is a large part of why finding US-based suppliers turned into the search it is now.

That last move deserves scrutiny, though, because it often isn’t what it appears to be. A meaningful share of “domestic” suppliers are importers with a US warehouse. The duty still gets paid. It just gets paid further upstream and arrives embedded in the wholesale price. The exposure didn’t leave the chain, it changed hands, and the seller lost visibility of it in the process.

For those going the other way and consolidating into bulk inbound freight, the arithmetic of importing wholesale at small volumes works differently than parcel-by-parcel sourcing. Tooling, minimum order quantities and working capital all move at once. In my experience that transition is consistently underestimated by people who have only ever done one of the two.

None of this is settled

The Detroit Axle case is live at the Court of International Trade, with duty refunds on the table. Commercial de minimis is repealed by statute on July 1, 2027 regardless of how that goes. The EU introduced a temporary €3 per-item customs duty on low-value consignments from July 1, 2026, running to 2028. The UK has committed to abolishing its £135 threshold but hasn’t set a date, and implementation could run to 2029.

So the planning question isn’t really “what’s the rate.” It’s whether your inbound model survives that rate changing again in six months.

On the evidence of the last eleven, it will.

About the author

Simon Slade is CEO and co-founder of SaleHoo, an ecommerce sourcing platform started in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2005. SaleHoo connects small online retailers with verified wholesale and dropship suppliers, and he has spent two decades watching how sourcing decisions get made at the smallest end of the import chain.