Cross-border shipping has always demanded precision. But over the past several years, precision alone hasn't been enough.
Tariff volatility on Chinese imports, the elimination of the de minimis exemption for all U.S. imports, ongoing United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) compliance requirements, and repeated carrier network disruptions have made international shipping one of the highest-risk operational functions for eCommerce brands.
For U.S. retailers and manufacturers shipping across borders, these aren't abstract policy concerns. They're operational realities that affect landed costs, delivery windows, compliance obligations, and ultimately, what customers pay and how fast they receive their orders.
Understanding what's shifting and why is the first step to building a shipping strategy that holds up over time.
Understanding cross-border shipping
Cross-border shipping is the movement of goods from one country to another, and the regulatory surface area is substantially larger than that of domestic operations. Where a domestic shipment involves carrier pickup, transit, and delivery, a cross-border shipment requires customs clearance, tariff classification, documentation review, and compliance with the import laws of the destination country.
For U.S. businesses that means working with a licensed customs broker, applying accurate Harmonized System (HS) codes to every product, and maintaining documentation that can withstand customs inspection: the commercial invoice, the packing list, the bill of lading, and where applicable, a certificate of origin under USMCA.
Any gap in that documentation chain creates exposure. A misclassified HS code can mean an incorrect duty assessment, potential penalties, or a delayed shipment. A missing certificate of origin leaves money on the table for shipments that would otherwise qualify for USMCA preferential duty rates.
What are global trade shifts?
"Global trade shifts" is the term for a recurring reality: When countries change how they engage with each other commercially, the operational rules for cross-border shipping change with them. Tariff adjustments, renegotiated agreements, new enforcement priorities—each one reconfigures the cost and compliance structure that shippers have to work within.
Examples from the past decade illustrate the pattern. The U.S.-China trade war, which began in 2018, imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars in goods, forcing shippers to reclassify products, absorb increased landed costs, or shift sourcing to avoid the highest tariff tiers. NAFTA's renegotiation into USMCA in 2020 updated rules of origin for North American trade, particularly affecting automotive, textile, and agricultural supply chains. Brexit introduced a customs border between the UK and the EU where none had existed for decades, requiring new documentation, VAT adjustments, and revised carrier routing.
The year 2025 brought especially consequential policy changes for cross-border eCommerce. Tariffs on Chinese imports swung dramatically, from a brief peak near 145% under International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) authority in April 2025 to 10% after the U.S.-China Geneva truce the following month to approximately 35% today under surviving Section 301 authority after the Supreme Court invalidated the IEEPA framework in February 2026. A new Section 301 investigation launched in March 2026 means rates could shift again before year-end. That kind of volatility makes landed cost planning genuinely difficult for brands sourcing from China.
The de minimis changes are, in some ways, more structurally significant. The duty-free threshold for low-value packages from China and Hong Kong was eliminated May 2, 2025, and by August 29, 2025, the exemption was gone for all U.S. imports, regardless of origin. U.S Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has collected more than $1 billion in duties on over 246 million low-value shipments since then. For U.S.-based DTC brands that once competed against direct-from-China sellers landing goods duty-free, the playing field shifted overnight. For any brand operating internationally, the era of frictionless low-value import is over.
These aren't isolated disruptions. The pattern itself is the insight: Trade policy changes regularly, often with limited advance notice, and the brands best positioned to absorb those changes built their shipping strategy around resilience rather than optimization for a single regulatory moment.
Navigating cross-border shipping amid trade volatility
The practical challenge for most shippers isn't understanding that trade policy changes. It's building operations that can adapt when it does, without rebuilding from scratch each time.
Tariff shifts can change the landed cost calculation overnight. Regulatory changes require documentation updates across carrier, broker, and platform systems. When the de minimis exemption was eliminated for all U.S. imports in August 2025, brands had to rebuild duty calculation, checkout pricing, and carrier documentation workflows simultaneously. Border processing disruptions can be just as disruptive: Canada's CARM customs portal rollout in 2025 generated system outages and registration backlogs that delayed clearance by weeks for foreign importers, with no advance warning and no simple workaround.
The scale of this pressure is visible in our own network data. The number of rerouting events tied to trade and tariff changes increased 2,458% between January and December 2025, surging from a baseline of roughly 300 parcels per month to 8,366 in December, with no plateau in sight. Trade volatility used to be the exception. It has become the standard operating environment.
Shippers that navigate this environment consistently share several operational characteristics. They maintain direct relationships with licensed customs brokers rather than relying solely on their carrier or 3PL to catch compliance issues. They classify products using accurate HS codes in advance and review those classifications when trade policy changes, since the same code may carry a different duty rate depending on the declared origin. They build supplier networks with enough geographic diversity to shift sourcing when a particular origin becomes prohibitively expensive. And they use tracking and compliance tooling that provides shipment visibility without requiring manual follow-up at every step.
Staying current on trade news is table stakes. Knowing which regulatory change requires an operational response and which is noise is where expertise earns its value.
The role of expertise in cross-border shipping
Compliance in cross-border shipping fails at predictable points, and most of them come down to gaps between what the shipper knows and what the situation requires.
The most common failure modes are consistent: incorrect HS code classification, incomplete documentation, failure to account for destination-country restrictions on specific product categories, and duty calculation errors that surface as unexpected landed costs for the end customer. Any of these can produce customs holds, financial penalties, or returned shipments. In a DTC context, a customs hold means a missed delivery window, a customer service inquiry, and in some cases, a lost customer.
The performance data makes the stakes concrete. Across our network, orders shipped DDP (duties pre-paid and documentation pre-verified) were more than 30 times more likely to clear and deliver successfully than DAP (duties delivered at place) shipments in our highest-risk lanes. That gap reflects the difference between a logistics system built around compliance and one that treats customs as an afterthought.
The distinction between a carrier relationship and a logistics infrastructure partner comes down to exactly this. A carrier relationship handles transit. As a logistics infrastructure partner, we handle the full operational system: customs clearance, documentation management, duty and tax calculation, carrier network selection by destination, and the compliance monitoring that keeps shipments moving as regulations change.
We work with eCommerce brands and logistics platforms that need that infrastructure layer. Our network spans more than 220 countries and territories, with direct relationships with destination postal operators and 100-plus carrier partners, built to support reliable last-mile delivery at scale and to reroute volume when conditions shift. As our co-president Fabrizio Alvear puts it, "Brands with automated routing shift volume in hours. Brands with manual processes take weeks. That time difference determines who maintains customer relationships."
Our DTC shipping solution, international returns management program, and eDGE domestic offering give brands a coordinated system across the full order lifecycle, from checkout to delivery to return. For brands managing tariff classification decisions, carrier routing adjustments, and compliance documentation across destination markets, that system-level support is what makes international growth operationally sustainable rather than operationally fragile.
For a deeper look at the 2025 data behind these findings, see the ePost Global 2025 International Shipping Insights & Trends Report.
Contact us to talk through your cross-border shipping setup.
