The parcel still weighs 400 grams and sells for 39 dollars. What changed is everything around it. It no longer rides through on a one line manifest description. It needs a tariff classification, a declared value that can be defended, and duty paid like any other import, because the duty free lane it used for a decade is closed.
De minimis under Section 321 let shipments valued at or under 800 dollars enter without duty and with minimal data. Its suspension, and the scheduled repeal importers have been told to plan around, means the value of the shipment no longer decides whether duty applies. CBP's guidance for carriers and filers now routes low value goods through entry types built for ordinary merchandise, with entry summary data following.
The practical shift is not the duty itself, which on a 39 dollar item may be a few dollars. It is the data per parcel: ten digit classification, country of origin, value per line. A model built on millions of parcels with a one line description has to become a model built on millions of classified lines, and that is an operations project, not a settings change.
Informal entry covers many low value commercial shipments with simplified paperwork, but simplified is not the same as casual: classification and value are still declared and duties still assessed. Formal entry, with its bond and full entry summary, applies above informal thresholds and for restricted goods regardless of value. Which door a shipment uses depends on value, goods type, and agency requirements, not on habit.
Partner agency goods never got the old shortcut in full anyway. Food, cosmetics, medical devices, and other regulated products carried FDA and other agency data requirements even in the de minimis years. Sellers of regulated goods who treated the whole lane as paperwork free were already exposed. The suspension just made the rest of the catalogue match them.
Three fields now carry the entry: classification, origin, and value. Classification at scale means a maintained mapping from SKU to HTS line, reviewed when products change, not a keyword guess per shipment. Origin means the actual country of manufacture per SKU, which for marketplace sellers reshipping from a third country is often not the country the parcel posts from.
Value means the transaction value of the goods, documented by the sale record, not a declared figure chosen to sit under an old threshold that no longer exists. Declaring values by habit from the de minimis years is the single easiest way to convert a routine entry into a valuation problem. The threshold is gone. The reasonable care standard is not.
Add the true stack per parcel: duty at the classified rate including any Chapter 99 lines, merchandise processing fee treatment for the entry type used, brokerage or filing cost per entry, and the returns problem, since a returned low value import rarely recovers its duty. Some products survive that arithmetic. Some were only ever viable inside a duty free lane and should be repriced, bundled to a higher basket, or dropped.
Do the arithmetic per SKU family, not for the catalogue as a whole. Averages hide the lines where a high Chapter 99 rate lands on a low priced good. Those lines are where the new regime actually bites, and they are findable in an afternoon with your own entry data and a spreadsheet.
Keep reading: Steel content reporting for Section 232: melt and pour is the record that matters, Reading the Chapter 99 lines on your Form 7501.
No. Informal entry still exists for many lower value commercial shipments, with classification, origin, and value declared and duty assessed, while formal entry applies above its thresholds and for certain goods regardless of value. What ended is duty free, minimal data treatment based on value alone.
A ten digit tariff classification, the true country of origin, and a defensible transaction value per line, plus partner agency data where the goods are regulated. At scale that means a maintained SKU to classification mapping and origin records per product, not a per shipment guess.
Only if they were the real transaction values. Declared figures that were chosen around the old threshold are a valuation exposure now that duty is assessed on them. The reasonable care standard applies to every entry, and the sale record is what the declared value has to match.
Rebuild the per unit stack: duty including Chapter 99 lines, filing and processing costs for the entry type, and a realistic allowance for returns that will not recover duty. Run it per product family. Lines carrying a high additional rate on a low price are the ones the new arithmetic usually kills.