Cheap goods from China on Americans’ go-to websites — from Amazon to Temu — are suddenly way more expensive.
Why prices on some of Americans’ go-to shopping sites are suddenly spiking
The end of the de minimis exemption, briefly explained.
Nicole Narea covered politics at Vox. She first joined Vox in 2019, and her work has also appeared in Politico, Washington Monthly, and the New Republic.
That’s because the “de minimis” exemption for Chinese imports expired Friday by order of President Donald Trump. Under that exemption, shipments of goods whose total value is less than $800 were exempt from tariffs — a threshold that included for most purchases individual Americans make from China.
Those days are over. As of Friday, Chinese imports that would have previously fallen under the de minimis exemption are “subject to a duty rate of either 30% of their value or $25 per item (increasing to $50 per item after June 1, 2025),” according to the White House.
Americans will pay the price as retailers pass on increased import costs to consumers. And given how many de minimis shipments arrive in the US every day, that price could be high.
A growing number of foreign imports have fallen under the de minimis exemption in the last decade. Between 2015 and 2024, the volume of de minimis shipments increased from 134 million to nearly 1.4 billion.
China accounted for the majority of them by far. In 2023, 62 percent of all de minimis shipments, valued at roughly $33.8 billion, came from China.
A few factors might be behind the explosion in de minimis shipments, especially from China.
For one, the de minimus exemption has been on the books since 1930, but Congress raised the threshold for qualifying goods in 2016 from $200 to $800. That made it cheaper to import more relatively low-value items.
The way Americans shop has also changed. Online, direct-to-consumer retail and dropshipping — when a business does not keep inventory in stock but turns to a third-party supplier to send items to its customers — has ballooned in recent years. Many of these businesses rely on Chinese suppliers being able to fulfill and send orders to the US cheaply under the de minimis exemption.
In anticipation of the exemption ending, Chinese retailers Temu and Shein announced that they are starting to raise prices. Price hikes vary by category of goods, but Bloomberg reported that Shein prices rose by about 10 percent in a two-day span last week. Temu added “import charges” of 145 percent of an item’s cost and then announced that it would stop selling goods imported directly from China to US consumers entirely.
The end of the de minimus exemption doesn’t just affect big retailers, but also small- to medium-sized businesses in the US — for example, individual sellers on Etsy and Shopify. Some such businesses have had to raise their prices and are now reporting a significant decline in US orders, requiring them to diversify beyond the American market if they can, according to CNBC. But the loss of US customers might also force many small businesses to close entirely.
For consumers, that means fewer and more expensive options — hardly a sign of the economic revival that Trump promised.
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