“[The secretaries] shall recommend modifications as warranted to protect both the revenue of the United States and the public health by preventing unlawful importations.”
For years, Amazon ruled the online sales world, thanks to economies of scale. With superior logistics and state-of-the-art regional warehouses, Amazon has become the preferred place for online third-party sellers and buyers.
A significant chunk of merchandise listed on Amazon’s site by third-party sellers comes from China. These sellers usually buy wholesale merchandise for more than $800, meaning that they paid the tariffs imposed on Chinese products. Then, they either absorbed the tax or passed it on to their consumers.
In the past few years, competition faced by Amazon’s third-party sellers has increased, as online upstarts from China, such as Temu, began selling packages worth less than $800 to U.S. consumers—tariff-free—at much lower prices.
To address this situation, Amazon launched Amazon Haul, a low-cost online storefront that sells merchandise priced at $20 or less, with most items costing less than $10.
Jeanel Alvarado, a retail expert for Retailboss, said she sees a parallel between Amazon’s Haul strategy and Facebook’s Threads.
“It similarly reminds me of how Mark Zuckerberg introduced Threads, and it gained massive adoption in a relative amount of time, now seen as X’s biggest competitor,” she told The Epoch Times via email. “It further solidified Facebook’s dominance in social media networks and its ability to tap into the needs of its customers.”
While this strategy helped Amazon lure back some price-sensitive customers, it didn’t address the underlying problem. Amazon’s third-party sellers continue to be at a disadvantage under the old tariff regime, with some being forced out of the market as profit margins disappear.
In an email sent to The Epoch Times, Fanis Matsopoulos, an executive board member of the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said that the $800 tariff exemption, combined with Chinese government subsidies, tipped the competitive field for online retailers such as U.S.-based Amazon in favor of foreign-based retailers such as Temu.
He said he believes that President Donald Trump’s move to close this loophole will do much more than level the competitive field between U.S.- and China-based online retailers; it will expand the import tax base, assisting the new president in coming up with funds to expand the tax cuts he implemented during his previous term.
“Tariffs, in this case, could boost revenues and promote a more business-friendly environment with fewer taxes,” he said.
Yiannis Tsinas, a former military diplomacy analyst in Washington, also praised this decision by the Trump administration.
However, he said he thinks that Washington should go further than that to create a fair competition environment between Chinese and U.S. online retailers. For example, he said in an email to The Epoch Times that “U.S. Postal Services should stop subsidizing international shipments from China.”
“Our postal service is subsidizing e-commerce companies in China and Singapore, for example, at the expense of U.S. taxpayers,” Tsinas said.
This, he said, is because of a “bizarre system” of the Universal Postal Union, which is a specialized agency of the United Nations that is responsible for coordinating international postal policies and services.
“[The postal union] and U.S. postal customers end up having to pay the difference between what it costs to deliver the package from China and what China Post pays the USPS,” he said.
