If you sell apparel on Shopify and you import your goods, two tariff changes this summer touch your landed cost directly. One already happened on July 24. One lands around September 1, and it can work in your favor if you know where your goods are made. Here is the plain version, without the policy jargon.
Two things happened the same day. The Section 122 surcharge, a flat 10 percent that had been sitting on top of many imports, expired. In its place, the US Trade Representative imposed new Section 301 duties tied to forced-labor findings, running 10 to 12.5 percent, on imports from about 60 trading partners.
So if you were counting on that 10 percent surcharge going away as relief, check your country of origin first. For a lot of apparel sourcing, one charge simply replaced the other, and for some origins the new rate is higher than what came off.
One more date if any of your line is made or finished in Canada: an added 50 percent on specified Canadian goods took effect August 19 under Section 338. Most apparel sourcing runs through Asia, so this misses most boutiques, but it is worth a glance if part of your line touches Canada.
Around September 1, tariff-rate quotas open for apparel from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Malaysia. A tariff-rate quota is a set volume that comes in duty-free, or at a reduced rate, up to a cap. Below the cap, the base duty on qualifying apparel can drop toward zero. Above it, imports revert to the normal rate.
These quotas become workable around September 1, which means orders you place now, for goods landing after that date, may qualify. The catch is that quotas fill. Early shipments capture the duty-free volume. Late ones land after the cap is hit and pay full freight.
Landed cost is your unit cost plus freight plus duty. Duty is the lever that moved this summer, and it moves in both directions depending on where your goods are made.
Here is the shape of it with round numbers, so you can follow the logic and then plug in your own. Say a blazer costs you $45 landed before duty. If it now carries a new Section 301 forced-labor duty in that 10 to 12.5 percent band, that is roughly $4.50 to $5.60 in added duty per unit. On a blazer you retail at $120, that added cost pulls your gross margin down by several points, on every unit you bring in.
Now the other direction. If you can source that same blazer from Bangladesh or Cambodia inside the new quota, the base apparel duty on it can fall toward zero. Apparel carries some of the highest normal duty rates in the whole tariff schedule, so for many categories that is a real clawback, not a rounding error. The exact figure depends on your HTS code and country of origin, so treat these numbers as illustration, not as your P&L.
Paste your Shopify URL. The free scanner reads your public catalog, applies category benchmarks, and shows you which products are most exposed under the current rates, in about ten seconds, with no signup.
Scan your store free →A short list, in order.
Know your HTS code and country of origin for each product. Everything above turns on these two facts, and a lot of merchants do not have them written down anywhere.
Ask your supplier, in writing, whether your goods qualify for the September 1 quota and whether they can ship inside it. Qualification and paperwork sit with the exporter, so this is a supplier conversation, not a guess you make alone.
Re-run your landed cost per SKU with the current duty, not last season's. If you priced these products before July 24, your margin on paper is probably not your margin today.
Two more worth a look. The Court of International Trade ordered CBP to refund roughly $165 billion in IEEPA duties that were ruled invalid, and the refund portal is live. If you paid those duties as the importer of record, you may be owed money back, though the administration is appealing, so nothing is final yet. And de minimis is not the escape hatch it used to be: the US $800 threshold is still suspended, and the EU ended its 150 euro threshold on July 1, so small cross-border parcels are getting caught now.
July 24, which already hit, and September 1, which you can still get in front of.
If you want to see where your own catalog sits under the current rates instead of these round numbers, you can run a free scan at tariffmargin.com. It reads your public Shopify catalog, applies category benchmarks, and shows you which products are most exposed, in about ten seconds, with no signup. Then you can enter your real cost for the exact figure.