It would have been nice if the US spent that money on building our critical mineral supply chain by building/funding more refineries. Ya know, since we dont have any.
OK, so long story short:
my company imports a ton from China (mugs with an alarm clock inside, if you must know) and we paid WELL over 500k in ieepa last year. When the whole supreme court thing happened (making the tariffs illegal) our go-to counsel recc'd us some litigation firm (I guess theyre friends?) to handle our refund. Thing is, they told us we'd need to file a bunch of lawsuits in the international trade court or whatever and we are starting to get the bill now that the refunds are coming in....
These guys took 20% of the refund (which seemed fair at the time). But now Im seeing that:
My customs broker told me absolutely nothing about this process LITERALLY ZERO and couldnt or wouldnt respond to my emails in a timely manner, Im not saying all CB are like this but I wanted to get that out of the way before yall start blaming me for not using them.
Just as US-EU trade tensions seemed to be cooling, a new flashpoint has arrived.
Trump has threatened a 100% tariff on any country imposing a digital services tax on American companies, and made clear it would supersede any existing trade agreements. This comes less than two weeks after the EU approved a deal designed to cut tariffs on US goods.
The tactic has worked before. Canada repealed its 3% digital services tax after a similar ultimatum to keep trade negotiations alive.
But the EU is a different beast. France already has a DST in place and has previously said it won't bow to US pressure. Germany and Belgium are planning their own versions. The core disagreement, whether large American tech companies pay enough tax on European revenue, has been running for years with no resolution in sight.
For ecommerce sellers operating across borders, this isn't abstract. A 100% tariff on goods from major EU trading partners means higher sourcing costs, more expensive imports, and consumers on both sides paying more for everything.
A few things worth discussing:
Do you think EU countries will back down the way Canada did, or is this a different situation entirely? If these tariffs do go into effect, which product categories do you think get hit hardest?
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I want to order an item from China that costs $2-3k. The seller said they could lower the declared value.
If i get them to post it for under $800 would there still be high tariffs? I don't watch the news and i stopped ordering things from Asia when all this started.
Thanks for any and all help.
Now he declares a food supply emergency.
Regardless how you feel about tariffs or what tariffs are supposed to do, the issue here is tariffs were put in place for small packages sent in the mail with no process on how to collect them. This vendor shipped the movie the U.S. Then USPS had no means to collect a tariff and just sent it back. That's it. This import wasn't taxed. It was effectively banned.
France introduced a €2 fee on low-value parcels from platforms like Temu and Shein, expecting to raise around €400 million a year.
After four months?
It raised just €2.3 million per month.
Because around **90% of the targeted parcels were simply rerouted through other EU countries** before entering France. Instead of landing in French customs, many shipments entered through places like Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Now France has scrapped the national fee as the EU introduces its own €3 duty across member states.
The big question is whether Europe’s new system will be any harder to avoid, or if platforms will simply adapt again.
Small business owner here - my husband and I run an independent garden center in Montana. Wanted to share something I think a lot of small retailers are dealing with but maybe haven’t put into words yet.
Back in Feb 2026, the Supreme Court ruled the IEEPA tariffs from 2025 were never legal. Since then, CBP has been refunding those tariffs - billions of dollars - but only to the importer of record. That’s usually not us. It’s our suppliers.
Here’s the thing: we never paid those tariffs directly, but we absolutely paid for them. Our supplier costs went up when the tariffs hit, and they got passed straight to us on invoices. Retail margins don’t have room to just eat a tariff and mark it up the normal amount - doubling shelf prices isn’t something customers are going to tolerate. So we ate it. Quietly, for almost two years, out of our own margin.
Now the tariffs are gone and the money’s flowing back… straight to the importers. Unless a supplier decides on their own to pass some of that refund downstream, retailers like us just eat the loss twice - once when the tariff hit, once when the refund doesn’t trickle down.
We sent a letter to our own suppliers asking straightforward questions: did tariffs apply to what you sold us, have you filed for/received a refund, and will any of that show up in our pricing or as a credit. Not accusing anyone of bad faith - this refund process is brand new and still tangled in appeals - but it felt worth asking directly instead of assuming it’ll just happen.
Curious if other small retailers/wholesalers are seeing the same thing, or if anyone’s actually gotten a supplier to pass a refund back. Feels like something more of us should be asking about.
Hoping someone here has run into this. I filed a CAPE IEEPA refund request for my business on a batch of entries and every one came back with the error "ENTRY SUMMARY IS IN FINAL LIQUIDATION STATUS."
When I pulled the liquidation reports in ACE (ES-701 Courtesy Notice and ES-702 Official Notice), all of the entries show as Liquidated with a "No Change" duty determination. A mix of Type 01 formal and Type 11 informal entries:
The Type 01 entries liquidated on the normal ~314-day cycle and show up in the official ES-702 notice.
The Type 11 informal entries liquidated only about 2–3 weeks after the entry date (essentially at release) and do not appear in ES-702.
My questions for anyone who's dealt with this:
Is it correct that CAPE simply won't process an IEEPA refund once an entry has reached final liquidation status, regardless of entry type? Also how is this our fault since Phase I started in April this year.
For entries still within 180 days of liquidation, is a protest (CBP Form 19 / e-protest) the only recovery route? Anything faster or cleaner?
For entries already past the 180-day protest window, is there any avenue left (e.g., CBP-initiated reliquidation under an IEEPA refund program, 1520(c), etc.), or is that duty just lost?
Anyone know if the informal (Type 11) entries liquidating almost immediately at release is expected behavior, and whether that effectively kills the CAPE refund path on those?
Completely lost as I’m not a customs broker and just looking to get back the IEEPA duty.
Hello Everyone,
I just wanted to get grasp on what most people are deciding to do about the entries that are already past 80 day liquidation but within the 180 day protest window. When I contacted US CUSTOMS and ask if I should file a protest, they literally just say "wait for phase 3". Roll the dice and pray phase 3 will roll out liquidated entries? or File protest and go though extra paper work in the off chance that there might be a light at the end of the legal tunnel?
Expect more price fluctuations in critical minerals as new tariffs get put in place.
