All is Fair in Love and Trade War – Discussing the Ongoing Trade War and Tariffs (April 11, 2025)

The ongoing trade war situation continues to change dynamically. As of yesterday, Trump has pulled back on some of the tariffs imposed on the rest of the world except China. We’re continuing to wait and see how the rest of the tariffs will play out. However there are some serious implications that consumers should know.

How to know if you’re paying too much in duties and tariffs

There has unfortunately been a big jump in mis-billed duties and tariffs from UPS brokerage, including charging duties and tariffs on:

• Shipments under $800USD that fall under deminimis
• Shipments that have items that are under USMCA and are tax exempt

If you get charged, don’t panic. We can help you. We have now established a process of pre-checking shipments to ensure that shipments do not get charged an unreasonable amount to clear before shipping, to make the process less stressful on your end. Unfortunately, there may be some charges, such as broker fees and tariffs on non-USMCA certified items, but we are working to keep the impact minimal.

If your shipment can be cleared without additional tariffs, we are marking them as DDP, which means that if there is an error on the broker side, we will pay the cost first so that we can dispute it directly, rather than needing to work through the customer.

When you order, you can check our list of items that are certified under USMCA here. Most items including:

• AltMills 2×4 and 4×4
• All versions of the LongMill
• All versions of the touchplate
• Vortex Rotary Axis
• LaserBeam
• gControl Panel Computer
• All versions of end mill sets

Items falling under the USMCA blanket certificate, as of time of writing, can cross into the US without paying duties and tariffs.

We have restricted the sale of some items, including the Makita RT0701 router as an individual item (Makita routers bundled with machines will still be able to ship without issues) and any t-shirts to the US by hiding them in the store to US customers as these items are likely to incur high tariffs and cause hold ups at the border.

UPS Brokerage changes at the US border

We just met with our UPS representative to go over a number of things.

First is that with so many changes happening so fast, there are a lot of mistakes happening in clearance for items. Here are some notes:

• With the new changes, UPS brokerage is handling an additional 150,000 submissions per day for customs. This is on top of what they have had in the past, which means that UPS brokers are working overtime and weekends. Because this brokerage is largely human driven, mistakes can be made.
• While in the past, shipments could reach the US and await customs clearance, goods are no longer allowed to enter into the US unless the clearance is complete in Canada. If any package in a truck or container does not have clearance already approved, the whole truck or container must be shipped back, causing additional delays in some cases.
• There has also been a huge jump in shipments returning back to Canada, because customers do not want to pay the new tariffs.

Given the ongoing situation, shipping rates are likely to be slower than usual. With the current situation, UPS has offered a reduction in our brokerage fee, which we are working on to acquire.

Starting May 2, 2025, the Trump administration intends to remove the deminimis exemption for shipments under $800USD for Chinese goods, which effectively puts a tariff on not just large shipments but small ones as well. This also includes products of Chinese origin entering the US from other countries, including Canada. This means that at the current time of writing, Chinese goods could have a 125% tariff imposed on them. This change is expected to put an even larger burden on brokerages as all shipments with Chinese goods will need to clear customs, regardless of how small it is.

As far as we can understand, this only applies to Chinese goods, which means that shipments containing non-Chinese originating products can still enter into the US under $800USD, tariff free. However, this may require us to adjust the type of product that we ship if they are originating in China.