Summary
- Amazon was rumored to show tariff costs during checkout, similar to sales tax.
- The White House calls the move a “hostile and political act”, and Amazon denies it’s doing that on the main site.
- Import duties already disclosed for websites like Shein and AliExpress, price increases are likely to continue.
With tariffs increasing the costs of everything left and right, the first ones that will get chewed out by angry customers will probably be retailers. Amazon, for what it’s worth, seems to be one of the companies that’s struggling heavily with this.
Recently, rumors began to swirl around that Amazon wanted to show customers how much tariffs cost every time they buy a new product. This would’ve presumably shown during checkout similarly to the way sales tax is listed out as part of the final cost of a product. This already isn’t that foreign of a concept. When you buy something on Amazon and set your shipping address in another country, it already lists out estimated import duties—you get charged a deposit, which may or may not be the final cost of import tariffs in the receiving country, and once your item arrives, you get refunded if the actual tariff happened to be less. This would’ve presumably done the same thing for products that either shipped out of China or shipped within the US following an import from China.
However, in a press conference earlier today, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt lambasted Amazon, calling the rumored move a “hostile and political act.” In a reply to this, Amazon issued a statement to The Washington Post saying that “the team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store has considered listing import charges on certain products,” going on to add that “this was never a consideration for the main Amazon site and nothing has been implemented on any Amazon properties.” It’s not clear if Amazon never actually considered doing this on its main website, or if it was, and US government pressure forced the company to abruptly backtrack.
The cost of import duties is already something that’s clearly disclosed when you buy something from websites like Shein, Temu, or AliExpress—it’s either shown as part of the shipping price or shown separately during checkout, but you get charged for it upfront nonetheless. If tariffs are not prepaid on websites like this, you can risk packages getting seized in customs until all import duties are paid—the long-standing de minimis exemption that allowed smaller packages from China to enter the US tariff-free is ending this Friday, so that will have an almost immediate effect over the next few weeks on a lot of the stuff we buy.
It’s not clear what Amazon will end up doing here, but one thing is clear—the price increases are not stopping anytime soon, even if some companies have managed to figure out savings out of thin air to stay competitive.
