I used to manufacture specialized consumer electronics in Shenzhen and sell them worldwide through Etsy. When Britain left the EU I stopped shipping to the UK rather than deal with VAT. I eventually stopped shipping outside the US altogether because shipping and administrative costs ate all the profit. When tariffs on Chinese goods went over 100% in 2024 I packed it in altogether. Bye bye side gig. The demand is still there. Maybe in 10 years I'll pick it up again.

These fees were sucessfully lobbied in the media as a "Temu tax", and even reputable state broadcasters continue to refer to it as a "junk fee". However, it applies indiscriminately to everything from a decades old vintage book purchased from the UK, or spare parts to restore electronics ordered from Japan.

I volunteer with a small US-based non-profit publisher [0], and this all matches my experience. We publish black-and-white technical journals that are worth almost nothing, and our European subscribers have occasionally been charged 20€ per copy by their customs authorities [1].

We're now prepaying the duties, which seems to have solved that problem, but a few months ago our printer informed us that we will now have to pay this additional €3 fee per copy, plus some undisclosed additional markup charged by the shipping intermediary. But at least they'll handle everything for us without any paperwork, so this is just expensive rather than a bureaucratic nightmare.

But unfortunately this fee seems unavoidable for us—we only mail ~300 copies to Europe per issue, so having multiple printing locations is infeasible; I've checked with a few other printers and they all quoted me double what our current printer charges, so it would be way too expensive to print everything in Europe; and timeliness is important for a periodical, so people can't just order in bulk. So it seems like we'll probably just have to raise our subscription rates again to cover these fees.

[0]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/contents.html

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48246014

Fwiw, non us businesses have the same problem trying to ship to the us. It’s how governments want to roll now and how they generate counter actions.

This is not a tariff issue, unbelievably, but one about reducing competition.

I’m not sure I’m following the argument here, because tariffs are all about protectionism, which is a form of reducing external competition