The Tariff Shift: Why Now Is the Time to Rethink and Reinvent Your Global Strategy

The rules of global ecommerce are changing quickly. If you are a brand selling into the US, this tariff shift isn’t a curveball. It’s a line in the sand.

If you’re importing from China, the changes to the $800 de minimis threshold are probably already punching a massive hole in your margins. That once-smooth DTC pipeline into the US? It’s more expensive, more complex, and far less reliable.

This isn’t a minor operational headache. It’s a strategic inflection point.

Now is the time to step back, get brutally honest about your exposure, and start building a smarter model. You need to think strategically about an ecommerce model that protects your margin, streamlines compliance, and sets you up for long-term global growth. Below, we’re outlining the key levers smart merchants are already pulling, and a new solution worth exploring if you’re serious about future-proofing your US sales strategy.

1. Rethink Your Fulfilment Strategy Before It Breaks

For many brands, the DTC shipping model has been a fast, relatively simple way to reach US customers. But that simplicity was propped up by lenient tariff thresholds and minimal friction at the border. That’s no longer the case.

As duties rise and compliance gets stricter, it’s time to assess whether your current fulfilment model is fit for purpose. That means running the numbers on landed costs under the new structure, identifying where you’re most exposed, and asking hard questions about scalability. Are your operations built to adapt? Or are they built for a version of ecommerce that no longer exists?

In many cases, it doesn’t mean tearing down your supply chain. But it does mean moving beyond autopilot. Building flexibility into how and where you fulfil is now a strategic necessity.

2. Compliance Is a Growth Lever. Start Treating It Like One.

Too often, compliance is seen as a legal box to tick, something buried in the back end of the business. But in today’s ecommerce environment, it’s much more than that. It directly impacts your pricing, your delivery experience, your customer satisfaction, and ultimately, your ability to scale without risk.

For any merchant serious about growth, this is the moment to get proactive. That means understanding how your products are classified, working out what duty changes mean at a SKU level, and figuring out how to recover costs through proper duty drawback mechanisms. Most importantly, it means having the right partners in place who know how to keep you compliant, without slowing you down.

3. Don’t Let Cost Surprises Undermine Customer Trust

As tariffs shift and cross-border costs increase, how you handle pricing and duties at checkout becomes just as important as how you manage them behind the scenes.

Customers don’t really care about trade policy; they care about transparency. If unexpected fees hit at delivery, or if shipping timelines slip without warning, trust erodes fast. Worse still, it creates friction that leads to abandoned carts and customer service blowouts.

This is where operational strategy meets brand experience. Whether you absorb duties, display them transparently at checkout, or adjust pricing to factor them in, the key is clarity. A seamless experience doesn’t mean avoiding the conversation. It means owning it, designing for it, and removing surprises wherever possible.

This will set you apart if you get this right. How you handle this with your customers can become a competitive advantage. Because, as we know, building a brand with loyal fans isn’t just about selling product. It’s about earning confidence in every market you sell into. That starts with making costs, timelines, and expectations crystal clear.

4. Go Beyond Workarounds and Find a Model That Shifts the Economics

If your US strategy still hinges on pushing individual parcels across the border, you’re playing a losing game. The smart move now is to rethink the structure altogether, not just plug holes.

That’s why one solution we’re pointing merchants towards is Global-e’s 3B2C model, a strategic alternative that reframes how you move product into the US. Instead of DTC shipments attracting duties at the parcel level, inventory is imported into the US as a business-to-business intra-company transfer, significantly reducing the duty burden. From there, the final transaction to the customer happens locally and seamlessly, with Global-e managing the entire process end-to-end.

No new warehouse. No logistics overhaul. No compliance grey areas.

What this unlocks is more than savings; it’s stability. It allows you to keep serving the US market profitably and predictably, even as the rules shift underneath everyone else. For the right brand, this can be the difference between protecting your margin and watching it erode month by month.

5. Think Bigger Than the US

The US may be your biggest market (and probably your easiest one until now), but it shouldn’t be your only plan. If these tariffs are causing you to take stock, that’s a good thing. This is a moment to reassess where your brand has the most opportunity internationally, not just the most legacy volume.

Look at where barriers to entry are lower, where your category is underserved, or where your brand positioning already has a cultural foothold. Markets like Canada, the UK, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia often represent untapped potential, especially for brands with operational agility.

This is about diversification and a challenge to think bigger and more broadly. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that over-reliance on a single channel, partner, or geography is a risk, not a strategy.

Building out an international roadmap, with the right infrastructure to support it, gives your business more resilience and more room to grow, even when things shift, as they always do.

If you need help navigating these changes and would like to explore whether B2C or a broader international strategy is right for your business and how optimising your Shopify store can support this, let’s talk.