Tariff watch

De minimis is gone: the new customs reality for Shopify sellers

For a decade, cross-border e-commerce ran on a quiet subsidy: the US de minimis exemption, which let any shipment valued at $800 or less enter the country duty-free with almost no paperwork. Most parcels a small store shipped to an American customer never really met customs at all. That era is over. The exemption has been suspended for every country since August 29, 2025, the suspension survived the Supreme Court's 2026 tariff ruling, US Customs and Border Protection locked it in by regulation in June 2026, and a statute already on the books ends it permanently on July 1, 2027. Every commercial parcel entering the US now goes through real customs entry — which means every parcel needs real customs data.

What changed, and when

Date	What happened	What it means
Spring 2025	US ends de minimis for goods from China	The first crack: China-origin parcels lose duty-free entry
Aug 29, 2025	Executive order suspends the $800 exemption for all countries	Every commercial import owes duties and needs entry paperwork, regardless of value
Feb 2026	Supreme Court strikes down the IEEPA tariffs — but a new order days later reaffirms the de minimis suspension on separate authority	The tariffs changed; the end of duty-free small parcels didn't
Jun 24, 2026	CBP issues an interim final rule making the suspension indefinite for non-postal shipments, with a concurrent rule for postal	No longer just an executive order — it's now customs regulation, effective immediately
Jul 1, 2027	Statutory repeal takes effect under 2025 legislation	De minimis ends as a matter of law, whoever holds office

The pattern is worth absorbing: this policy has now survived a change of legal authority, a Supreme Court loss for the tariffs it arrived with, and the transition from executive order to formal regulation — and it has a statutory end date behind all of it. Waiting for duty-free small parcels to come back is not a strategy.

What "suspended" means at the border

Under de minimis, a $40 parcel crossed with a label and a prayer. Now that same parcel requires formal or informal customs entry: classification data, origin data, declared value, and duties assessed on all of it. Three fields on your products carry most of that load — the HS code, the country of origin, and an accurate weight. When any of them is missing or malformed, the parcel gets flagged for manual review, held, assessed unexpected fees, or sent back. And because carriers eat cost when shipments stall at the border, they've moved enforcement upstream: incomplete customs data increasingly gets a parcel rejected at intake, before it ever ships.

If your store ships to US customers

This applies whether your store is in London, Toronto, Sydney, or Berlin: the United States is now a full-customs-data destination for every order, including the $25 ones. Duties are owed from the first dollar of value, and the entry process runs on your product data. A catalog with complete HS codes and origin countries clears; a catalog with gaps generates holds, delivery delays measured in weeks, surprise broker charges passed to your customer, and refund requests when parcels boomerang home. The stores that sailed through the chaos of late 2025 — when postal networks worldwide briefly stopped accepting US-bound parcels because nobody had the data customs suddenly demanded — were the ones whose catalogs were already classified.

If you're a US store shipping abroad

The same logic is arriving on every lane, because other governments watched the US do it. As of July 1, 2026, the EU charges a temporary €3 duty on parcels under €150 while it dismantles its own low-value exemption for good. The UK has confirmed its £135 relief will be removed by March 2029 at the latest, with consultation underway now. And if you quote landed costs at checkout with a duty calculator, that tool is only as accurate as the HS codes on your variants — garbage in, mis-quoted duties out, chargebacks later. Complete customs data stopped being a nice-to-have for US exporters at the exact moment their customers' governments started charging duty on everything.

The catalog problem this creates

Here's the practical squeeze. The three fields customs now demands on every parcel live on each variant's inventory item in Shopify, inside a collapsed subsection of the product page — and the product CSV has no column for two of them. Shopify's bulk editor will let you type HS codes down a grid, but nothing native shows you which products are missing them in the first place. So the new rules effectively hand every cross-border store an audit assignment — "prove every variant is classified" — with no built-in way to run the audit.

That audit is exactly what Origova is: it scans your whole catalog, lists every variant missing an HS code, country of origin, or weight (and flags malformed codes that won't survive entry), and lets you fix them in bulk — reversibly, written straight back to Shopify. The scan takes about two minutes, and it turns "are we ready for the new rules?" from a guess into a number.

Not customs advice Tariff policy has moved fast since 2025 and details — rates, postal mechanics, entry thresholds — keep shifting. This page reflects the rules as of July 2026. For entry-process specifics on your products, your carrier or a licensed customs broker is the right source; for US classifications, start at hts.usitc.gov.

The short version

The $800 duty-free door to the US closed in August 2025 and is not reopening — regulation holds it shut today, and statute welds it shut in July 2027. The EU started charging duty on small parcels this month; the UK is phasing its exemption out. Every parcel crossing a border now needs an HS code, a country of origin, and a real weight, and Shopify won't tell you which of your products are missing them. Finding out is the part Origova does — before customs finds out for you.

Frequently asked questions

What was the de minimis exemption?

A US rule that let shipments valued at $800 or less enter the country duty-free with minimal paperwork. For a decade it was the quiet engine of cross-border e-commerce: most parcels a small store shipped to a US customer crossed the border with essentially no customs friction.

Is the de minimis exemption coming back?

No. The August 2025 suspension survived the Supreme Court's 2026 ruling against IEEPA tariffs, CBP made it indefinite by regulation in June 2026, and legislation signed in 2025 terminates the exemption by statute on July 1, 2027. Plan as if duty-free low-value shipping to the US is permanently over.

Do my products all need HS codes now?

If parcels cross a border in either direction, effectively yes. Every shipment entering the US now goes through formal or informal entry, which requires classification data. And destination countries are tightening too — the EU began charging duty on parcels under €150 in July 2026. An HS code and country of origin on every variant is the new baseline.

What happens to a parcel with missing customs data?

It gets flagged for manual review, delayed, assessed surprise fees, or returned to sender. Carriers increasingly reject incomplete customs paperwork at intake rather than risk holds at the border, so missing HS codes or country of origin can now stop a parcel before it ships at all.

Does the end of de minimis affect sellers outside the US?

It affects them most of all. Any Shopify store in the UK, EU, Canada, Australia, or anywhere else that sells to American customers now needs complete customs data — HS code, country of origin, value, weight — on every single parcel bound for the US, regardless of how small the order is.