E-commerce & small parcels

For most of the last decade, cross-border parcel retail ran on a single exemption. Shipments worth $800 or less entered free of duty on a manifest line, carrying a fraction of the data a normal entry carries. That is over. De minimis was withdrawn for China and Hong Kong in May 2025 and for every remaining country at the end of that August, and Entry Type 86, the ACE entry type built to move those shipments, went out with it. If your landed cost model still has a zero in it below $800, it is wrong by the full tariff rate on every unit you sell.

What files now

Everything is an entry. Under $2,500 that is normally an informal entry, Entry Type 11. Above it, a formal entry, Type 01. Merchandise subject to antidumping or countervailing duty, or to quota, is formal at any value at all. Each line carries a ten-digit HTS number, a country of origin and a value CBP can test, and each entry carries a merchandise processing fee, which at parcel volumes stops being a rounding error and starts being a budget line.

Volume is handled by consolidating correctly, not by filing faster. Merchandise arriving on one conveyance consigned to one consignee belongs on one entry under 19 CFR 141.51, so four hundred parcels for the same importer on the same flight become one entry, one fee and one exam surface instead of four hundred of each. Getting that structure right is most of the cost difference between two brokers filing identical volume.

The bond breaks first

A continuous bond is sized at ten percent of the duties, taxes and fees the importer paid over the previous twelve months, with a $50,000 floor. An importer who paid almost nothing while de minimis existed, and who now pays duty on every parcel, will cross that threshold within a quarter and receive an insufficiency notice. An insufficient bond stops entries, and stopped entries at parcel volume back up into the fulfilment centre within a day. We track the rolling twelve-month figure and file the increase before the notice arrives. The alternative is single transaction bonds on live cargo at whatever the surety quotes that morning. See customs bonds for how we size them.

Tariff exposure in 2026

Origin decides the bill. Section 301 duties still sit on Chinese-origin goods across Lists 1 through 4A, at rates that were raised on several categories in the statutory review. Actions taken under IEEPA add country-specific rates on top of that. Section 232 reaches steel and aluminium content, including content inside derivative articles, so a parcel of tools or a metal-cased device can need its metal content reported and dutied separately from the rest of its value.

None of this follows the warehouse. Origin is where goods were made or substantially transformed, so product manufactured in China and despatched from a fulfilment centre in Mexico or Vietnam is still Chinese for duty purposes, and a mismatch between shipping point and declared origin is exactly the pattern CBP targets on. Parcels moving through foreign postal operators now carry duty too, assessed by the carrier rather than waved through, and the flat per-item method used during the transition has run out.

What goes wrong on parcel entries

• Descriptions written for shoppers. “Set of 4, assorted” is a listing, not a description. It cannot be classified, and it invites a request for information that holds the whole consolidation.
• Values that are not transaction value. Promotional pricing, shipping absorbed into the unit price, tooling supplied to the factory and free samples all move the dutiable value, and marketplace data rarely records any of it.
• Partner government data missing at parcel level. Prior notice for food and supplements, facility registration and product listing for cosmetics under MoCRA, CPSC certificates for children’s products, equipment authorisation for anything with a radio in it.
• A foreign seller acting as importer of record without the structure that requires: a CBP-assigned number via Form 5106, a bond in its own name, and a resident agent who can accept service of process.
• Returns treated as new imports. Goods of US origin come back under 9801.00.10. Where duty was paid and the item is exported again, drawback recovers most of it, but only if the export is documented when it happens rather than reconstructed a year later.

What we need from you

A product master, not a shipment file. SKU, plain description, material composition, function, country of origin, unit value. We classify against that once, keep the mapping under review as the catalogue changes, and file from it, which means classification decisions get made with time to think rather than at the moment a plane is on the ground. Then a feed: a structured file per shipment or a direct connection into our filing system. We would rather spend a week mapping your data than key parcels by hand for a year.