Recently, the USPS (United States Postal Services) temporarily suspended every inbound parcel from China and Hong Kong posts under further notice, according to the USPS website. However, the website also mentioned that the suspension will not affect the flow of letters coming from China or Hong Kong.
Many people believe that this is tied to President Trump’s move to end the “de Minimis” shipments from China and a few other countries, but the postal service has not commented on whether there is a tie or not. Recently, President Trump halted the “de Minimis” as a part of his plan to implement a 10% additional tariff on China and a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada, which has been paused for a month as of now. This was done after the US Congressional Committee found out that almost 50% of all packages under “de minimis” come from China. De minimis allows any goods worth less than $500 to come into the country duty-free.
As a result, experts believe e-commerce companies like Amazon, Shein, and Temu might increase their prices as the de minimis allowed them to ship low-value packages duty-free from China.
This is mainly because the recent success of companies like Shein and Temu was caused by this loophole, which allowed small packages to enter the US duty-free. Statistics show that Temu and Shein accounted for almost 30% of all packages that came through the de minimis.
Juozas Kaziukenas, the CEO of e-commerce data firm Marketplace Pulse, shared his view on recent developments and said, “For companies like Temu and Shein this is obviously a very big deal because de minimis was one of the levers they used to be able to offer these low prices as well as ensure speed of products entering the country once they were shipped.”
