Amazon is not alone in placing products closer to the customer “to ensure that we have the right inventory, in the right places, at the right time,” but some Chinese distributors may be abandoning their strategy of storing goods in US warehouses due to increased tariffs, since the entity that imports the goods is the one that pays the tariff.
A small-business owner shared on Reddit that his distributor in China is “abandoning” the US market, which he says leaves his brand high-and-dry because no one in the US makes comparable items.
In a post on the Small Business subreddit, he said his Chinese distributor told him the US had become too difficult and that they made more money elsewhere. “I planned for so many different things over the past few months,” he said, “which should allow us to weather the storm for the next year or so, but I didn’t expect our largest supplier to back out of the U.S. market entirely.”
The business owner said he was looking into importing the items himself, “but I’m already hitting walls and the added expense is enormous. Sigh. We’re cooked.”
He then elaborated, “We receive products from their U.S. warehouse on products they’ve already imported, not their Chinese warehouse, so they’ve simply stopped importing the products.” He said he could purchase the items from the distributor directly from China, but only in larger quantities. That, combined with the tariffs, made the cost prohibitive, he said.
The Reddit thread was shared on BlueSky, where one commentor opined that no one would invest in manufacturing in the US (which is the current administration’s stated goal in imposing tariffs) because of the uncertainty – the tariffs may be gone in a week, or a month, or whenever, they said.
Uncertainty is real – the current administration was inconsistent in its messaging last week about whether the tariffs were negotiable. But as we reported in the EcommerceBytes blog, some sellers remain positive about the tariff strategy both in terms of the impact on their own businesses and in terms of the wellbeing of the United States.