Category

USA shipping

For orders placed after 22nd August 2025:

For orders placed through our website, we are now collecting US import taxes during checkout. If the de minimis suspension goes ahead as scheduled on 29th August, then:

  • Dispatch of US orders will be delayed until at least 28th August. Royal Mail (the UK postal service) is recommending that no new parcels are sent to the USA until they enable their duties-paid service. They are confident that they will be able to provide a duties-paid service to the USA starting from around 28th August, the suspension is just to make sure that they can get all existing packages through US Customs before the de minimis exemption is removed. Their information page about this is here: https://www.royalmail.com/usabusinessupdates . The actual withdrawal date for the old services is 26th August, but since we are closed at weekends and there is a UK public holiday on the 25th, we cannot send any further packages to the USA prior to that date.
  • The only shipping method available through our website to the USA is now 'International tracked postage'. With this shipping method, US import tariffs will be collected during checkout so there should be nothing further for you to pay. 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/
  • If you would like to avoid using 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 currently cannot prepay the import taxes, so you will have to pay them 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.
  • There might or might not be some delivery delays. The massively accelerated timeline for removal of de minimis means that many organisations have struggled to prepare for it in time, so we don't yet know how smoothly US Customs, USPS, transportation carriers, and anyone else involved will manage to deal with the new system.

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 clicked 'estimate shipping', then 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 for US customers 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. We will have a look next week to see if we can do anything about how the 'inc tax' prices are displayed on product pages.

If the removal of de minimis ends up being delayed:

  • If Royal Mail's duties-paid service is still able to go ahead, we will proceed as detailed above, with US import taxes collected at checkout.
  • If we are unable to send items duties-paid to the US by Royal Mail, and the only postal option is to send duties-unpaid, then we will refund the taxes collected from you at checkout. If there are any taxes due, you will have to pay these separately to USPS. This might happen if the de minimis exemption is extended to give everyone involved more time to prepare.

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 currently do for packages on which import taxes are due.

For postal packages, it looks like the US government intends to collect the taxes via transportation carriers. The plan seems to be for the carriers to 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, postal services are struggling to put systems in place to deal with that within such a short timeframe.

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 will likely go back up to over 100%, so DX Engineering may have set their prices based on that higher rate.