A quiet anniversary
May 2, 2026 marked one year since the United States ended duty-free treatment for low-value packages arriving from China and Hong Kong. It did not get much attention this week. There was no retrospective panel, no vendor blog post declaring victory. But the anniversary is worth pausing on, because it is one of the few tariff changes from the past two years with enough time behind it to actually judge, rather than predict.
The de minimis exemption let packages worth $800 or less enter the US without duty. US Customs and Border Protection processed more than 1.3 billion such shipments in fiscal year 2024, roughly 3.8 million a day, up from 134 million in 2015. Temu and Shein built their US growth on that pipeline. On April 2, 2025, President Trump signed the order ending it for China and Hong Kong effective May 2; a broader order eliminating de minimis for all countries followed on July 30, 2025, taking effect August 29. The rate on affected postal shipments moved twice in the following weeks, up to 120% on April 9, then down to 54% effective May 14.
None of that is news anymore. What is worth looking at, a year on, is what actually happened to the businesses caught in it.
The predicted collapse didn't happen, and neither did a clean fix
The immediate reaction in spring 2025 was alarm bordering on obituary. Commentators expected Temu and Shein's US operations to buckle, and small Etsy and Shopify sellers who had built cross-border dropshipping models on duty-free shipments to fold outright. Neither happened cleanly. Temu stopped shipping directly from China to US customers and leaned harder on US-based sellers and warehousing. Shein raised prices in April 2025 and kept operating. Both companies are still around, still selling in the US, a year later.
What changed instead is quieter and less dramatic than collapse: cost structures moved, margins compressed, and the businesses that survived did so by restructuring fulfillment rather than by absorbing the tariff and hoping it would go away. That is a less satisfying story than "loophole closed, fast fashion crumbles," but it is the more accurate one, and it is the pattern retail technology vendors selling into cross-border commerce should have been watching for instead of waiting on a single dramatic outcome.
Amazon's earnings calls show the lag
Amazon's own commentary across the past year is a useful timeline of how slowly tariff costs actually move through a retail supply chain. On the company's Q1 2025 earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy suggested that with enough seller diversity, some merchants would choose to protect market share rather than pass tariff costs to shoppers. By January 2026, speaking at Davos, his tone had shifted: "Some sellers are deciding that they're passing on those higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices; some are deciding that they'll absorb it to drive demand; and some are doing something in between." He noted that stockpiled inventory bought before the tariffs took effect had largely run out by fall 2025, which is when price increases started showing up in the marketplace in earnest.
By Amazon's Q1 2026 earnings call on April 29, tariffs had become background noise rather than headline risk: net sales were up 17% year over year to $181.5 billion, AWS grew 28%, and the tariff discussion had moved from "will this hurt us" to routine commentary about seller pricing behavior. That is roughly a year from policy shock to routine line item, which is a reasonable planning horizon for any retail platform or POS vendor trying to model how fast a trade policy change actually reaches shelf prices.
The EU is about to run the same experiment
If the US closure gives a one-year read, the EU is about to generate a second data point on a different timeline. On February 11, 2026, the Council of the European Union gave final approval to new customs rules ending the bloc's 150 euro duty-free threshold for small parcels, most of which come through e-commerce channels dominated by the same Chinese platforms. An interim system starts July 1, 2026, charging a flat 3 euro duty on parcels under 150 euros; the threshold disappears entirely on July 1, 2028, at which point standard EU customs tariffs apply regardless of value.
That staggered timeline, flat fee first, full tariff exposure two years later, is a different design than the US approach, which moved in weeks rather than years. It gives European retailers, logistics providers, and commerce platforms a longer runway to adjust pricing and fulfillment than their US counterparts got. Whether that produces a smoother transition or just a longer period of uncertainty is the question worth watching over the next two years, and it is one the US experience does not fully answer, because the US never tried a phased rollout.
What this means for the platforms in between
The retail technology layer sitting between shoppers and these shipments, checkout platforms, fulfillment software, customs brokers built into ecommerce backends, spent the past year building compliance into infrastructure that used to be a checkbox. That work does not show up in a press release. It shows up in earnings calls that treat tariff costs as an operating variable instead of an emergency, which is exactly what Amazon's April call did.
A year is not long enough to call the de minimis shutdown resolved. Enforcement volume is still climbing, the EU's version has barely started, and postal duty rates have already moved twice since the initial order. But it is long enough to say the sector adapted rather than broke, which is a less exciting headline than the one written in May 2025, and a more useful one for anyone building commerce infrastructure on the assumption that trade rules will keep shifting under it.
Sources: White House Fact Sheet: Closing De Minimis Exemptions · NPR: Temu, Shein tariff shopping · CBP: CBP Ready to Enforce End of De Minimis Loophole · Council of the EU: New customs duty rules for small parcels · Amazon Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript