For orders placed after 22nd August 2025:
For orders placed through our website, we are now collecting US import tariffs during checkout.
- Royal Mail (the UK postal service) started providing a duties-paid service to the USA as of 29th August, so we are still able to send packages to the USA now that the tax-free exemption has been removed.
- The only shipping method to the USA available through our website is now 'International tracked postal'. With this shipping method, US import tariffs will be collected during checkout, so you will not need to pay them separately. We will send your order by Royal Mail, who will pass it to USPS for delivery. In the past, international postal packages have mostly arrived within 2 to 3 weeks: https://www.sotabeams.co.uk/store-help/rm-international-status/
- Royal Mail have increased the weight limit for postal packages sent to the USA, previously it was limited to 2kg. This means that we can now send larger or heavier orders, which previously had to go by courier, at a lower cost through the postal system instead.
- Packages seem to be moving through the postal system and getting delivered within roughly the same timescales as before. However, there may be an extra day or two delay in dispatching orders to the USA, since Royal Mail don't seem to be charging us the correct amount if we send small / light packages on the same day as large or heavy packages. Until that is resolved, we may need to alternate which sizes of package we dispatch on each day.
- Shipping costs to the USA have increased slightly, since Royal Mail charge us a bit extra for the admin work involved in collecting the taxes.
- If you would like your order to be shipped using a method other than Royal Mail / USPS, please email us with your delivery address and details of the items you would like to order. We will then check courier shipping costs for you. If you are happy with one of those courier options, we will create the order manually and send you a Paypal invoice to pay for it. However, note that for most couriers we cannot prepay the import taxes in the way that we are now doing with postal packages, so you would have to pay the taxes separately as detailed at https://www.sotabeams.co.uk/store-help/taxes/ . We will not collect any taxes when you place your order in that case.
Taxes will be calculated during checkout. You can check them prior to checkout by adding some items to your cart, then going to the cart page and using the 'Shipping: Add info' link to enter a delivery address. When you have done that, and selected and applied a shipping method, the item prices in the cart should update to include US import tariffs.
At the moment, the 'inc tax' prices on product pages might still show the prices for UK customers (which include 20% sales tax: VAT, which is not charged on orders exported outside the UK) even if you have entered your delivery address on the cart page. To make sure that you are seeing the item price inclusive of US tariffs, add the item to your cart and set a US shipping address on the cart page. The price shown in the cart for that item should then be correct - it will be the 'ex tax' price plus a percentage based on which country the product was manufactured in.
If anything looks wrong, please email us with details at support@sotabeams.co.uk - we have had to do all this in a bit of a hurry, so there may be a few things that still need tweaking.
Information about US territories outside the US mainland
The information on this page definitely applies to anywhere within the customs territory of the United States (the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico). We are not sure whether it also applies to US territories that are outside the customs territory of the United States (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, US Virgin Islands).
It could depend on how the package is routed - if the package enters the USPS system through the US mainland, US Customs might still expect payment of the tariffs. For some locations (Guam, US Virgin Islands), the UK postal service lists them as a separate country when entering an address, for others (American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands) it does not. But we are not sure whether that has any relation to whether tariffs will apply to the package.
Note that some US island territories may have their own taxes (independent of President Trump's tariffs) for you to pay separately, we do not collect those taxes during checkout. We only collect the tariffs imposed under the IEEPA.
Our website is currently configured to charge US tariffs if the country selected for the shipping address is Puerto Rico or the United States.
For orders placed before 22nd August 2025:
For orders placed before we started collecting US tariffs: if there are any import duties or customs clearance fees to pay, then it is the responsibility of the recipient to pay these. They will not have been shown or charged during checkout when ordering on our website, you will need to pay them separately at a later date as detailed at https://www.sotabeams.co.uk/store-help/taxes/
Background information
In the past, most orders that we shipped directly to customers in the USA were exempt from import duty, since the the USA had a generous 'de minimis' threshold of $800. For shipments which had a value below this threshold and were sent direct to consumers, US Customs did not charge the recipient any import duty.
However the US government has decided to make 'de minimis' treatment unavailable for nearly all shipments entering the USA, and there are substantial increases to the import duty rates, especially on products originally manufactured in China (which is the case for some of the items that we sell).
The removal of de minimis started earlier this year with items made in China, by means of an executive order. Removal of de minimis was then scheduled to expand to all items on 1st July 2027 by one of the provisions in Trump's Big Bill. However, another executive order was used to bring this date forward to 29th August 2025, with only one month notice.
For orders sent by courier after the removal of de minimis, we think the courier will probably require the recipient to pay the taxes plus an admin fee before delivery, as they previously did for packages on which import taxes are due.
For postal packages, taxes are being collected by either transportation carriers, or by intermediaries engaged by postal services. In most cases, these companies will charge the taxes to the sending postal service, who will charge the sender, who will have charged the recipient at the time the order was placed.
However, many postal services struggled to put systems in place to deal with that within such a short timeframe.
- The UK postal service managed to put something in place within about a week, with taxes collected via the sender: https://www.royalmail.com/usabusinessupdates .
- Many other postal services announced delivery suspensions, mostly without any specific end date, until they finish implementing systems to deal with this. Some of them have now managed to find solutions. In some cases (such as Ireland), this involves the postal service or a partner company contacting the recipient to pay the taxes before the package is transferred to the US, instead of the taxes being collected through the sender.
If you buy from DX Engineering instead of directly from us, then import duties will be included in the price that DX Engineering charge you, there should be nothing extra to pay. DX Engineering have now raised their prices to account for the import duties.
DX Engineering's prices for some items made in China are very high at the moment, this is probably because the US tariff rate on Chinese goods has been temporarily lowered while negotiations are underway. If this lower tariff rate expires or is terminated, the tariff could increase by a substantial amount, so DX Engineering may have set their prices based on that higher rate.