Sending this 320 dollar goal from Japan to Spain costs $ 29. Sending it to the US costs 2,000, and it is not a typographic error

For international vendors, Sending certain products to the United States makes no senseso to avoid these sales they are going to a singular technique: not touch the price of the product, and instead raise shipping prices to absurd amounts. It is an infallible method and a curious response to Tariff policy restrictive imposed by Donald Trump.

2,000 dollars to send a product of 320. A Japanese eBay seller called Ninjacamera.japan sells an objective for Olympus cameras that It has a price of $ 319.99. So far everything is fine. The surprise is carried by those who want to ask for that product from the US, because sending it there costs 2,000 dollars, when shipping to countries like Spain costs $ 29. In Xataka we have checked the data, and it is indeed so.

Because. The reason is simple. As soon as he started his presidency, Donald Trump initiated a tariff war with everyone, but also ended the exception “of Minimis”. This exception allowed packages with value below $ 800 could enter the US without paying taxes. It is something that Companies like Temu or Shein They took the opportunity to “exploit” commercially in the North American country, but now that commercial shortcut has disappeared. Result: Send “cheap” products to the US is too expensive.

The US online buyers have it raw. This exemption ceased to be active for China and Hong Kong in May 2025, and for the rest of the world the exemption was definitively eliminated at the end of August. The change especially affects US online buyers, especially those who take advantage of foreign online stores to acquire all kinds of cheap products.

Sellers have an easy solution. As they point out in 404 mediaFor foreign sellers it is much easier to raise the shipping price to absurd amounts – like those 2,000 dollars for the photographic objective – than to erase their inventory products to exclude them from their sale in the United States.

Goodbye to negative criticism. Not only that: impose on buyers the theoretical cost overrun to which the new tariffs would make them see how that goal of 320 dollars would cost them much more expensive and the rest of the users do not. If they do not know the situation well with the tariffs, they would probably punish the seller with online criticism of all kinds. These sellers avoid this problem to a large extent with the simple technique of raising shipping prices.

Another example. As indicated In The Wall Street Journala customer bought a 77 dollar shirt from a Swedish brand and in addition to the shipping costs of $ 30, another $ 42.35 were charged for tariffs. The shirt was actually manufactured in China: while Sweden products have 15%tariffs, If they come from China that figure rises to 54%. Another bought components from Canada worth $ 640 to fix an oven and charged him no less than $ 1,192.12 for “government charges”, in addition to an intermediation commission of $ 128.17.

An unsustainable situation. For American buyers the situation is really complex, and buying products of all kinds that come from abroad can end up getting extraordinarily expensive. The big messaging companies operating in the US —Fedex, DHL and UPS – indicate in WSJ that US consumers are still confused by the situation Despite its FAQand they don’t just understand the implications of tariffs. At this step the confusion will become something else.

Tariffs continue to negotiate. The commercial war between the US and China remains at a delicate point. After an escalation almost comical Of the tariffs that one and the other were going to activate, both countries They signed a truce At the end of May and special conditions were also granted for semiconductors and electronic products. All these terms still do not materialize, but China has many more assets to negotiate than Europe, whose agreement with the US was A disaster for EU countries.

Spain (and the rest of the world) are fought for now. This type of extraordinary uploads of shipping prices or “government taxes” surcharges only affect US buyers. That is the reason that the prices we see in all types of electronic commerce platforms have not triggered at the moment, but tariff policies and the delicate commercial balance could cause Notable prices changes that consumers pay when buying products abroad.

In Xataka | China has found the formula to avoid reciprocal tariffs with the US: “dropshipping” of semiconductors