What do you do when the cost of delivering your product changes faster than you can update your price list?
That question isn’t rhetorical for anyone selling across borders right now. The $800 de minimis exemption — the rule that let low-value parcels enter the United States duty-free and without formal customs entry — is gone. China and Hong Kong lost it first, effective May 2, 2025. Executive Order 14324 suspended it for every other country on August 29 of that year, on roughly thirty days’ notice, accelerating a timeline Congress had set for July 2027. A lot of merchants had built their entire pricing and COGS models on duty-free entry. They got a month to rebuild them.
Tom Madine has been watching that scramble from an unusual seat. He’s CEO of ShipStation Global, the company created in June 2026 when WWEX Group’s freight brokerage merged with Auctane, the software business behind ShipStation, Stamps.com, Metapack, and Packlink. The combined operation serves more than three million customers and moves over three billion shipments a year, backed by a network that includes more than 75 LTL carriers and roughly 45,000 truckload carriers. Madine spent three decades in logistics before this. His read on the current moment is not that it’s a squeeze.
“In logistics, the only constant is change,” he says. “Businesses need to be prepared not only for today’s environment, but for an environment that’s likely to become even more complex.”
That’s a bracing thing to hear from someone whose customers would very much like to be told the opposite.
The tooling gap nobody designed on purpose
Madine’s diagnosis of why small sellers got hit so hard isn’t really about tariffs. It’s about who the infrastructure was built for. “Most solutions in the industry weren’t built for a ten-person shop; they were built for larger shippers — shippers with a team that understands customs and freight contracts,” he says. “So small sellers have had to make do with solutions that weren’t built for them.”
The result was a familiar kind of workaround. Stitch together five or six tools, hope the data lines up, accept freight rates priced for someone shipping ten times your volume. Madine argues that gap is what the merger was meant to close: “We combined the freight network and relationships from WWEX Group with the shipping software from Auctane, because we don’t think small and mid-sized businesses should have to wait for the world to get simpler. They need better tools for a world that’s staying complicated.”
He’s describing a problem his own company sells the fix for, obviously. The underlying observation still holds. A 3PL relationship, a customs broker, and a rate-shopping engine used to be separate procurement decisions, each with its own minimum — which is what made cross-border selling an enterprise capability rather than a default one.
Three decisions before the next purchase order
Asked what a business owner should actually do before the next shipment goes out, Madine gets specific fast.
Start by decoupling the duty from the price. “Don’t bury a volatile tariff inside your product price,” he says. “Use a floating line item, or price with a landed-cost calculation, so you can adjust for a new rate without repricing your whole catalog every time something changes.” For a marketing organization, that’s a merchandising and messaging decision as much as a finance one — it determines whether a rate change triggers a quiet line-item adjustment or a full catalog repricing exercise.
Second, know your landed cost at the SKU level. Madine’s blunt about how many sellers don’t: “Too many sellers are still pricing off last quarter’s cost structure.”
Third, model it before you commit. “If you can see the cost before the purchase order goes out, you can make a decision. If you’re finding out after the shipment lands, you’re already behind.”
Where the standard advice quietly breaks
Two moves dominate the current advice cycle: split inventory across markets, and move to delivered duty paid so customers don’t get ambushed at the door. Madine endorses one of them with more enthusiasm than the other.
On DDP, he points to Guaranteed Prepaid Duties and Taxes, a feature ShipStation launched in November 2025 that lets merchants pay duties and taxes at the moment of label creation for qualifying UPS, FedEx, and DHL Express shipments. “The customer never gets hit with a surprise bill at the door and the shipment clears customs without stalling,” he says. He frames it as a threshold capability: real once you’re shipping enough international volume that buyers expect an all-in price.
Splitting inventory gets a colder read. “Splitting inventory into a second market ties up cash in a warehouse, which makes it more incumbent on having the volume to support it,” Madine says. “If your margins are thin and your order sizes are small, it can push you above what a customer is willing to pay.” His advice on that one is short enough to put on a wall: “Know your numbers before you copy what a bigger competitor is doing.”
That last line is the most useful thing in the whole conversation for a marketing leader, and it has nothing to do with shipping. Competitive mimicry is a real failure mode in DTC strategy. The tactic that works at 50,000 units a month can be actively destructive at 500.
The mistake is waiting
Madine says the question he hears most often is some version of when things go back to normal.
“I tell them, don’t wait for the rules to hold still. Because they’re not going to — change is constant. The mistake to avoid is treating this as temporary.” He adds a definitional point that’s easy to miss: “Logistics changes all the time so by definition ‘normal’ is ever-changing.”
For CMOs, the translation is about planning cadence rather than logistics. If landed cost is a moving input, then pricing architecture, margin governance, and the promises made on a product page all need to be built to absorb movement — not re-litigated each quarter when something shifts. Surprise fees at delivery are a customer experience failure that shows up as returns and support tickets long before it shows up in a P&L.
“The businesses that build flexibility into their sourcing and shipping now,” Madine says, “will be the ones still standing in five years.”
