How U.S. Tariffs Are Affecting Prices at Amazon, Walmart, and Temu

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A tariff can raise the price of an online purchase without ever appearing as a separate charge. Amazon, Walmart and Temu sellers may recover import costs in their prices, while a shipment sent directly from abroad can leave the buyer owing customs duty separately.

Both start with a tax on goods entering the United States. The difference is who imports them: a business stocking a warehouse, or a buyer ordering across the border. That distinction helps explain why one order might simply cost more while another requires a separate payment to clear the package.

The tariff can be in the price or in a separate bill

A tariff is a tax on imported goods, as the Congressional Research Service explains in its U.S. Tariff Policy: Overview. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency that clears imports, administers tariff collection at ports of entry.

Federal customs regulations make import duties a personal debt of the importer unless law or regulation provides relief. Paying a broker does not relieve the importer if that broker never pays the duties to the government.

For a personal purchase from an overseas seller, the buyer is generally the importer, customs lawyer Jason Wapiennik explains. For an order supplied from inventory already brought into the United States, the earlier import and the later retail purchase are separate steps. A retailer’s higher price can therefore reflect its import costs without making the retail customer the person who owes that earlier border charge.

DHL’s customs guidance says duties and taxes are usually paid by the receiver unless the sender chooses to cover them, and the carrier can facilitate payment. For a direct overseas order, ask whether the seller is covering import duty or leaving it to the recipient. Treat a promised delivery price and a promise to pay duty as separate questions until the seller confirms the terms.

Cheap packages lost the automatic duty-free route

Low-value imports from China lost duty-free treatment on May 2, 2025; the worldwide suspension followed on August 29, 2025. The old de minimis exemption, meaning special duty-free treatment for imports worth $800 or less, was indefinitely suspended for shipments arriving outside the international mail network by a Customs and Border Protection rule effective June 24, 2026. The rule is titled Indefinite Suspension of the De Minimis Exemption for Merchandise Arriving Through All Modes Other Than the International Postal Network.

Those non-postal shipments require formal or informal customs entry procedures rather than the special entry route for the exemption. Customs entry means submitting the shipment information needed to clear goods and assess charges; the rule allows different entry procedures rather than requiring every small order to use the formal process. An inexpensive order shipped directly from China therefore does not become duty-free simply because it costs less than $800.

The companion rule is titled Indefinite Suspension of the De Minimis Exemption for Mail Shipments and New Postal Informal Entry Process. For international mail, a new postal informal entry process took effect July 24, 2026 and generally covers eligible merchandise valued at $2,500 or less. The postal rule provides for collection of all applicable duties, taxes and other fees, replacing an interim process that collected only a subset.

The non-postal rule leaves separate exemptions unchanged for bona fide gifts worth $100 or less, or $200 from certain island possessions, and certain personal or household articles worth $200 or less accompanying arriving travelers. An ordinary shopping order should not be confused with those narrower gift or traveler provisions.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, also terminates the statutory de minimis exemption effective July 1, 2027. That future date does not restore the exemption in the meantime: the regulatory suspension already applies.

Amazon, Walmart and Temu face different choices

On January 20, 2026, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy told CNBC that tariff-related costs were starting to push up some product prices on Amazon’s platform, Reuters reported. Jassy said some sellers were passing higher costs to consumers, some were absorbing them to support demand, and others were doing a mixture.

In that January 2026 interview, Jassy said Amazon had brought inventory shipments forward and encouraged third-party sellers to stock up, but that supply ran out in the preceding fall. This helps explain a delay between a border charge and a price change: stock acquired earlier can postpone the point at which a seller faces higher replacement costs. It does not establish a single percentage increase for every Amazon order.

On its May 15, 2025 earnings call, Walmart said it would try to keep prices low but could not absorb all tariff pressure given narrow retail margins.

For the quarter ended July 31, 2026, Walmart reported receiving approximately $2.9 billion in refunds of tariffs it had paid as importer under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Walmart said a significant portion of those refunds went into customer-focused initiatives, primarily price investment and other cost mitigation strategies. That company-wide account does not specify the tariff amount inside an individual customer’s shopping basket.

Temu said on May 2, 2025 that all U.S. sales were being handled by locally based sellers, according to Reuters reporting on its shift away from direct factory-to-consumer shipments.

Temu’s U.S. terms distinguish local warehouse products sold by third-party merchandise partners from other products Temu sources from those partners. They also say a customer may act as importer of record where applicable and unless specified otherwise, authorizing Temu to appoint a freight forwarder or customs broker to pay duties on the customer’s behalf. The importer of record is the party identified as responsible for that import, so the order’s terms matter more than assuming every Temu purchase works the same way.

Higher import costs do not become identical price increases

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s June 4, 2025 report, Are Businesses Absorbing the Tariffs or Passing Them On to Their Customers?, described a May survey of businesses in New York and northern New Jersey. About three-quarters of surveyed manufacturing and service businesses facing tariff-induced cost increases said they passed at least some of those costs to customers. Nearly a third of manufacturers and about 45 percent of service firms said they passed along all of those increases.

That regional survey illustrates different business responses; it does not measure an Amazon, Walmart or Temu shopper’s exact price change. The New York Fed researchers explained that pricing choices depend partly on competition, customers’ reactions and businesses’ ability to maintain profit margins.

In Paying More and Buying Less: 2025 Tariffs and U.S. Household Spending, a Federal Reserve working paper revised August 10, 2026, Sinem Hacioglu-Hoke and Leo Feler estimated that a one percentage point tariff-rate increase raised retail prices by approximately 0.15 percentage points. Their research used purchase records for more than 125,000 U.S. households observed from January 2024 through December 2025, including online and physical-store purchases.

The estimate describes an average relationship across the study’s purchases, not a calculator for a particular listing. The tariff rate, the importer’s cost and the final retail price should not be treated as the same number.

How to check an Amazon or Temu order

For an Amazon item shipping directly from China, start with the seller and shipping terms rather than the Amazon logo. Ask who is the importer of record, whether import duties are included in the checkout total, and who will pay if the carrier seeks payment. If the buyer is the importer and the sender has not covered the duty, a separate payment can be owed.

To check whether duty was paid on an Amazon purchase, look for an explicit import-charge entry in the order details or invoice and ask the seller or carrier for the customs paperwork. If no separate charge is identified, the listed product price alone cannot tell how much tariff cost a seller absorbed or recovered. Do not calculate an embedded duty amount by multiplying the retail price by a tariff percentage.

For Temu, check whether the product is identified as local warehouse stock and read the importer and duty provisions that apply to that order. If a charge is described as an estimate or an import deposit, ask how it will be settled and whether any further amount can be collected. A local warehouse label and an overseas shipment should not be assumed to carry identical payment arrangements.

DHL says customs duties and taxes depend on the type of goods, their country of origin, value and quantity. Ask for those details when checking an unexpected bill, along with an itemized explanation of any carrier fee. Customs lawyer Wapiennik recommends keeping the product listing, invoice and payment record to document the purchase and its value.

A court ruling did not end every tariff

In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, decided February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not authorize the president to impose tariffs. Congress also gives presidents tariff powers under other laws, as the Congressional Research Service explains in Congressional and Presidential Authority to Impose Import Tariffs.

Customs and Border Protection’s GUIDANCE: Section 301 Forced Labor Import Duties implemented duties on imports from sixty economies, with exemptions, effective July 24, 2026. Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 authorizes the U.S. Trade Representative, the federal trade-policy office, to impose tariffs in response to specified foreign trade practices that violate U.S. trade-agreement rights or burden or restrict U.S. commerce.

In an August 19, 2026 order in In re Section 301 Forced Labor Cases, the U.S. Court of International Trade designated Learning Resources, Inc. v. United States of America as its sample case. On September 30, 2026, the Court of International Trade heard arguments in the challenge to the forced-labor tariffs, Reuters reported.

Following that September 2026 hearing, Reuters reported that the panel was expected to issue a written ruling in the coming weeks. A pending challenge is not itself a decision removing a duty, so check any subsequent ruling alongside the applicable customs guidance. The ruling on one statute should therefore not be read as proof that a particular imported product has no duty.

Customs and Border Protection assesses imports using the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States, which classifies merchandise and specifies tariff rates. Check the applicable product classification and the agency’s current implementation guidance with the seller or carrier before relying on a headline rate. The useful question at checkout is who has agreed to pay the duty on this shipment; the useful question about a higher product price is how the seller has chosen to recover its costs.