Clothing, furniture, appliances, electronics — and the boxes you ship them in. If you buy any of it from a US supplier, your cost of goods changed on 8 September.
In force since 8 September · what hit retailers
Canada’s counter-tariffs cover $27.6 billion of US imports. The categories that land on a retail business:
- Clothing and apparel
- Furniture and appliances
- Electronics
- Cartons, boxes, bags and packing containers — at 50%
That last one is the one nobody sees coming. Every parcel you ship carries it, and it is being charged now — this is live, not something coming later in the year.
And if you sell south as well as buy from the south, the US measure captures textiles, leather goods, plastics and furniture at 50% — and a CUSMA certificate does not exempt them. Most Canadian retailers are exposed on both sides of the same border. Talks between Ottawa and Washington have broken down, so plan on this lasting rather than lifting.
What we do about it: we work out exactly where your catalogue is exposed, build you a private AI knowledge base on your own supplier and product data, and scope what to build next. The review also covers who else in the world would buy what you sell. See what you receive →
What this actually does to a storefront
Retail sits in the worst position of any sector here. Your costs move weekly. Your published prices and shipping promises are fixed the moment a customer loads the page. Every hour that gap stays open you are either eating duty or losing the sale at checkout.
- The margin goes quietly. Apparel, footwear and home lines sourced through US distributors climb. Pricing set in July is loss-making in September, and nobody notices until month-end.
- Shipping costs move independently of freight. Packaging at 50% is a per-order cost that does not show up in any freight quote or supplier price list you currently watch.
- US-bound orders come back. Duties collected at the customer’s door drive refund requests, chargebacks and one-star reviews. Any page that cannot show a true delivered price loses the cart.
Three things to do this week
- Ask where your packaging is made. Not your products — your boxes, mailers, void fill and tape. If the answer is the United States, source a Canadian equivalent now. This is a phone call and it is the highest-return hour available to you.
- Tag your catalogue by country of origin. Most Canadian storefronts have never recorded this at SKU level, and without it you cannot say which products are captured.
- Show delivered price on US-bound orders. Duty at the door is the single largest driver of refunds in cross-border retail, and it is entirely preventable.
What it looks like in practice
Worked example · an eleven-person outdoor clothing and gear shop in Kelowna
One store, one warehouse out back, and an online side that now outsells the floor. They ship about 180 parcels a week, average order $96 in Canada and $54 to the United States. Roughly a fifth of revenue comes from American customers, and about half their stock arrives through US distributors.
The boxes cost more than the duty on what is inside them. Corrugated cartons and plastic mailers from their US packaging supplier are both at 50%. That is a charge on all 180 parcels a week, including every domestic one, and it appears in no freight quote they read.
The tariff is not what killed the US orders. The $800 de minimis exemption ended on 29 August 2025. Every parcel south now clears customs formally and carries a merchandise processing fee of around US$7.85 on a manual entry, on top of any duty. One documented case saw a $37 item land at $60.17. On a $54 average order that is the whole margin, and the owner had been blaming the exchange rate.
Half the catalogue they wrote off is probably fine. The US measure is 554 specific tariff subheadings, not whole categories. Their base layers and shells are captured — textiles and clothing are confirmed on the list. Two hard-goods lines do not appear under any code we could match. One of them sits close enough to a listed line that we would not swear to it without a broker’s ruling, and we said so rather than guess.
Then the other half. Under CETA 98% of EU tariff lines are already duty-free for Canadian goods, but bulky outerwear is a freight problem before it is a duty problem, so Europe is a year-two move. Australia and New Zealand are the nearer fit: no translation, familiar common-law contracts, and opposite seasons that turn their end-of-winter stock into new-season stock — with freight and strict biosecurity as the real obstacles to solve first.
What we would build:
- Country of origin and HS code as real fields on every SKU, with a screen that says which codes are on the 554-line list and which are not — so the question gets answered once instead of re-argued every order.
- Landed-cost display on US-bound carts: duty plus the processing fee shown before payment, and a minimum order value that stops small parcels losing money.
- A packaging cost line in the weekly margin report, fed from actual carton and mailer invoices, so a supplier increase shows up that week rather than at year-end.
- An Australia and New Zealand storefront variant with local sizing, currency, and a merchandising calendar flipped six months.
Two of those are a fortnight of work, and together they turn a cost the owner could not see into a number on a screen every Monday morning.
What you receive
Six things, built for your business, starting within 48 hours of checkout.
The core is a written review: we run deep research across your products, suppliers and sector, then a human checks every finding against the actual schedules and throws out what is wrong. You also get a private AI knowledge base trained on your own website, catalogues, supplier lists and contracts — yours to keep, and able to answer “which SKUs in our autumn range are captured?” with a source you can check. Running through both is a scoped plan of what we would build, with real hour estimates.
Alongside those: a slide deck for the conversation with your partner or lender, a one-page infographic, and video and audio overviews.
See a complete worked example → — every artifact, unredacted, for a business we invented so we could publish all of it.
What we would build for your store
- Landed-cost checkout that calculates duty, brokerage and tax at the cart, so nobody gets a surprise bill at the door.
- A SKU-level exposure dashboard mapping your catalogue against current schedules, flagging what is captured and which margins have gone negative.
- Dynamic repricing that moves listings automatically as supplier costs and duty rates move, across your storefront and connected marketplaces.
- A supplier substitution finder surfacing non-US and domestic alternatives for your highest-exposure lines, ranked by cost and lead time.
And beyond tariffs: multilingual storefronts for buyers who are not American, new sales channels, and the operational tooling you have been putting off. See our case studies.
And the other half — who else would buy this?
A storefront is already most of the way to being an export business: you have product photography, a payment processor and a pick-and-pack routine, and none of that cares whether the parcel goes to Calgary or Cologne. What stops most Canadian retailers is not the product but the freight arithmetic, the returns address and the fact that nobody outside Canada has heard of you — and under CETA, 98% of EU tariff lines are already duty-free for Canadian goods, so the duty is usually the smallest of those three problems.
98% of EU tariff lines duty-free under CETA, and 450 million people who buy online.Japan
CPTPP took Japanese duties on worked wood and aluminum goods to zero on day one.Australia & NZ
No translation, opposite seasons for your winter stock. Freight and biosecurity are the catch.Getting found
Ranking and running ads where non-Canadian shoppers actually search, in their language.
Two things worth knowing
There is money for this
Ottawa has $7.5 billion behind tariff-hit businesses, including non-repayable contributions up to $3 million. We do not run those programs and take nothing from them. The full list →
Cutting costs buys a year
Customers who are not American are the answer that lasts — and for retail, that is a solvable problem. Selling beyond the US →
Questions we get asked
My products qualify under CUSMA. Am I still hit?
On the US side, yes. The Section 338 duties apply to goods that would otherwise receive CUSMA preferential treatment. This is the single biggest misconception among Canadian retailers, and it is why so many landed-cost models are quietly wrong.
I only sell to Canadian customers. Does this matter?
More than you would think. Canada’s counter-tariffs raise the cost of US-sourced inventory, packaging and fixtures. You feel it as a wholesale price increase rather than a customs bill, which makes it easy to attribute to inflation and miss.
Couldn’t I just run this research myself?
You could, and if you would rather do that than nothing, please do. What you are paying us for is the part a general-purpose tool gets wrong — ask one about tariffs and retail and it will lead with apparel and miss the boxes. Someone has to read the actual schedules and check them against your real catalogue.
Do I have to hire you for software afterwards?
No. The plan is written to be useful whether or not you ever work with us.
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Related
- Grocery and local retail
- Warehousing and 3PL
- Logistics and freight
- The full rules, in plain English
- Where else in the world would buy this?
The worked example above is an illustration, not a client, but every tariff fact in it is real. Operational and strategic guidance from a software studio, not legal, customs, or tax advice. Confirm classification and duty liability with a licensed customs broker. Last reviewed 11 September 2026.