Ecommerce Shipping to USA in 2026: What Actually Works

Ecommerce shipping to USA — the essentials

Ship a $60 phone case to a customer in Ohio in 2026 and that parcel needs a customs entry. The $800 duty-free de minimis exemption that used to make it unnecessary is gone for commercial shipments. Every box now needs an entry filing, a 10-digit HTSUS classification, a declared value, a country of origin, and a named party on the hook for the duty. DHL, FedEx, UPS, a freight forwarder, or the international postal network — the mode changes which form you file, not whether you file.

The short version of what you have to build: classify your catalogue, decide who is the importer of record, post a customs bond if you need one, quote duty-paid prices at checkout, and stop treating shipping cost and landed cost as the same number. Skip that last one and a courier turns up at your customer’s door asking for money. They do not blame the courier.

Which path a shipment falls into depends on three things: value, mode, and what the goods actually are.

Shipment	Path	Notes
Non-postal, value $2,500 or less	Informal entry	Eligibility set by 19 CFR 143.21
Non-postal, value over $2,500	Formal entry	Customs bond required under 19 CFR 142.4
Postal, $2,500 or less, HTSUS Ch. 1–97	New postal informal entry process	In effect since 24 July 2026
Excluded categories (AD/CVD, quota, PGA-regulated, alcohol, tobacco, Ch. 98/99, FTA claims)	Formal entry or Entry Type 13	Compliance date 22 October 2026

Background that actually matters

Section 321 of the Tariff Act of 1930 let goods valued at $800 or less per person, per day enter duty-free with almost no paperwork. No entry, no broker, no duty line — that single provision is what made $12 direct-from-factory dropshipping arithmetic work. It ended in stages: suspended for products of China and Hong Kong effective 2 May 2025, then for all other countries effective 29 August 2025.

The suspension originally rested on emergency tariff authority, and for a few weeks in early 2026 sellers thought the whole thing might unwind. On 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorise the president to impose tariffs, and the IEEPA-based tariffs terminated on 24 February 2026. De minimis did not come back with them. On 24 June 2026 US Customs and Border Protection published two interim final rules re-grounding the suspension in customs statute — one covering all modes other than the postal network, one covering mail and creating a new postal informal entry process. Separately, Congress had already repealed the commercial de minimis privilege outright in the 2025 budget law, effective 1 July 2027. Three independent legal footings now hold it down; knocking out one changes nothing.

Scale explains the pressure. CBP processed over 1.36 billion de minimis shipments in fiscal year 2024, the twelve months ending 30 September 2024. In a press release dated 17 December 2025, CBP said it had collected over $1 billion in duties on more than 246 million low-value shipments since the phase-out began in May 2025. That works out to roughly $4 a parcel — these are small consignments being assessed one at a time, not containers.

The duty layer on top has also been rebuilt. New Section 301 duties took effect 24 July 2026 at 10% or 12.5% depending on the trading partner, covering 60 economies and roughly 99.4% of US imports, with the combined rate capped at 10% for EU and Taiwan goods and 12.5% for Japan, Korea and Switzerland. These rates are under active litigation. Do not hard-code them into your pricing table; read the current HTSUS and CBP’s CSMS messages before you quote a landed cost.

How to apply it in practice

Start with the fees you can actually budget for, because they are published and stable within a fiscal year. For fiscal year 2026, effective 1 October 2025, CBP set the Merchandise Processing Fee for formal entries at 0.3464% of value, with a minimum of $33.58 and a maximum of $651.50 per entry. Informal entries pay a flat MPF of $2.69, $8.06 or $12.09 depending on how the entry is prepared and filed. That minimum is the number that reshapes your logistics: 0.3464% of a $200 parcel is 69 cents, but you pay $33.58 — a 48-fold markup — and you pay it again on the next parcel. Fifty $200 parcels filed separately is $1,679 in MPF. The same $10,000 of goods in one formal entry is $34.64. Consolidation is not an optimisation here, it is the whole game.

If you go through the mail, the postal informal entry process requires the owner, purchaser, or a licensed customs broker acting for them to file — foreign postal operators and unlicensed third parties cannot, so the arrangement where your supplier’s forwarder quietly handled all of it is no longer on the table. You need a basic importation and entry bond, single-transaction or continuous, on file in ACE eBond before anything is filed, and shipments are not released until CBP has it. Filings go in monthly with 10-digit classifications, origin, declared value, duty calculations and tracking data, with payment due by the 7th of the following month via Pay.gov. CBP’s voluntary Entry Type 13 electronic test opened 22 September 2026 for shipments outside the postal process.

On bonds: CBP sets a continuous bond at 10% of duties, taxes and fees paid in the prior 12 months, with a floor of $50,000. You do not hand over $50,000 — that is the coverage amount, and what you pay is an annual surety premium against it, typically a few hundred dollars for a first-year importer sitting at the floor. Quotes for identical coverage routinely differ by two or three times once a broker folds the bond into a service package, so get at least two and ask specifically whether the ACE eBond filing fee is included. The other trap is underestimating next year’s duty spend: once your paid duties push past the bond amount, CBP tells you to increase it, and your shipments sit until the new bond is on file.

What commonly goes wrong

The most expensive mistake is shipping DAP/DDU — letting the carrier bill your US customer for duty on delivery. The buyer paid $46 at checkout, then a courier asks for another $14 plus a brokerage fee before handing over the box. Some pay it resentfully and leave a one-star review that uses the words hidden fees, which costs you far more than the $14. Many refuse delivery, and you eat the outbound freight, the return freight, and the refund — three costs incurred to dodge one. Ship DDP instead, calculate landed cost at checkout with a real classification, and say plainly on the product page that duties and taxes are included.

The second common failure is lazy classification — one generic HS code applied to a whole catalogue, or declared values set to a token amount. The rates are not close enough for a guess to be harmless: a cotton T-shirt under 6109.10.00 carries 16.5% MFN duty, while the same shirt in man-made fibre under 6109.90.10 carries 32%. Get the fibre content wrong across a season of orders and the gap is payable retroactively, with interest. Token values are worse. That is a false declaration, it invites civil penalties and cargo holds, and it is exactly the behaviour the current enforcement posture is built to catch.

The third one catches sellers who read the entry table too quickly. The postal informal path covers HTSUS Chapters 1–97 only, outside the excluded categories — so a supplement, a cosmetic, or anything else touching a partner government agency drops out of it and into formal entry or Entry Type 13. If a third of your catalogue is FDA-regulated, you are running two clearance processes rather than one, and you want to price and staff for that before the 22 October 2026 compliance date, not after.

Checklist you can use today

Pull your ten best-selling SKUs and get a real 10-digit HTSUS code for each, not a category guess — a licensed broker will rule on all ten in an afternoon.
Confirm country of origin per SKU from your supplier in writing — origin, not shipping location, drives the rate, and routing goods through a third-country warehouse does not change where they were made.
Decide your importer of record and get a customs bond quoted from at least two sureties.
Switch your checkout to DDP and rebuild prices from landed cost: product + freight + duty + MPF.
Model consolidation: compare 50 individual entries against one consolidated entry into a US 3PL, including the $33.58 formal-entry MPF minimum.
Set domestic delivery expectations from published standards — USPS Ground Advantage is 2–5 business days for items up to 70 lbs, with tracking and $100 of included insurance. Promise two days on the product page and the gap is yours to explain.
Check your sales tax exposure state by state. California’s economic nexus threshold is $500,000 in gross sales with no transaction count, and marketplace sales count toward it — including the Amazon orders you never thought of as your own.

Common misconceptions

“Under $800 is still fine.” No. The $800 administrative exemption is suspended for commercial goods across every mode of transport. Value no longer decides whether you owe duty — only which entry type you file.

“I’ll mark it as a gift.” The $100 bona-fide gift exemption (and $200 for gifts from certain island possessions) and the $200 personal exemption for accompanying articles do survive the suspension unchanged. Neither applies to a commercial sale. An order with a payment record and a shipping confirmation behind it is not a gift, and labelling it one is a false declaration, not a workaround.

“Postal is the loophole.” Mail is now the more demanding channel in several respects: a bond on file before you can file anything at all, monthly reporting with per-line classification data, and a hard payment deadline on the 7th that does not shift for weekends or your accounting cycle.

“My supplier handles customs.” Only if a written agreement says so and names the importer of record. Ask for that clause in writing; if what comes back is a reassuring message rather than a contract term, the penalties and back duties land on you.

Summary

Ecommerce shipping to the USA in 2026 is a customs problem wearing a logistics costume. The $800 shortcut is gone, replaced by entry filings, classification work, bonds and a duty layer that has changed three times in eighteen months. The sellers still making money did three unglamorous things: they priced duty into the product rather than the shipping line, they consolidated so the $33.58 MPF minimum lands once instead of fifty times, and they paid someone qualified to classify the catalogue instead of hoping. Verify every rate against the current HTSUS and CBP guidance before you quote it — including the ones in this article, which reflect the position as of 2026 and will move again.