Low value shipments enter the US under Section 321 with light paperwork, but light paperwork is not no paperwork. Importers using de minimis at volume need records that prove value, origin, and eligibility when customs comes asking. This guide sets out what to keep and for how long.
De minimis applies per person, per day. The same importer cannot split a larger consignment into parcels to stay under the threshold, and customs actively looks for splitting patterns. Proving compliance means being able to show, for any given day, what arrived for each consignee or importer and what each shipment contained and was worth.
High volume sellers often discover their logistics partners hold most of that data in dashboards that vanish after a few months. Contracts with carriers and consolidators should state how long shipment level data is retained and how the importer can export it, long before anyone needs it for an enquiry.
Eligibility turns on fair retail value in the country of shipment, and the number on a marketplace listing is not always the number customs expects. Discounts, bundles, and free items in a parcel all complicate the value story. Keeping the underlying order record, the price actually charged, and how shipping was treated gives the importer a defensible value instead of a reconstructed guess.
Undervaluation, whether deliberate or sloppy, is the fastest way to lose de minimis privileges and attract penalties. Businesses should reconcile a sample of cleared parcels against real order values regularly; a small systematic gap found by your own audit is a fixable process bug, while the same gap found by customs is a credibility problem.
For each shipment, keep the order and payment record, the item descriptions and quantities, the declared value and how it was calculated, the shipper and consignee details, and the carrier tracking and entry references. Add supplier invoices for the goods themselves, which support both value and origin if questions widen beyond a single parcel.
Retention should match the general customs standard of five years from entry for entry related records. Storage is cheap; reconstruction is not. A simple archive habit, exporting shipment data monthly into the importer's own storage, satisfies the requirement without new systems for most small businesses.
Some goods do not belong in de minimis channels at all, including many regulated products and goods subject to other agencies' requirements or to trade remedy duties. A record system that cannot flag which products are excluded will happily document a violation in perfect detail, so product level eligibility checks belong upstream of the shipping decision.
Finally, assign the records an owner. In small teams, de minimis data tends to live between the marketplace account, the carrier portal, and one person's inbox. Naming who consolidates and checks it quarterly turns a pile of exports into an actual compliance record.
Keep reading: Country of origin marking mistakes that get shipments held, Which entry data errors cause the most customs delays for DTC brands?, and How do customs bonds work for DTC importers, and how much coverage is enough? cover the nearby cases in this series.
Clearance is simplified and often handled through carrier data, but the shipment still enters under a legal provision with conditions. Importers remain responsible for eligibility, value accuracy, and records, and customs can request supporting information after release.
Five years from the date of entry is the standard customs recordkeeping horizon and the safe target for shipment, value, and order records. Carrier dashboards alone rarely retain data that long, so importers should export and archive it themselves.
Splitting means dividing what is really one consignment into multiple parcels so each falls under the 800 dollar threshold for the same person on the same day. It breaches the per person per day basis of Section 321 and is a pattern customs specifically screens for.
No. Goods subject to certain agency requirements, quotas, or trade remedy duties can be excluded, and counterfeit or unsafe goods are prohibited regardless of value. Eligibility is product specific, not just value specific.