We enabled the collecting duties for the US in “Settings” > “Duties and import taxes”. On September 05 it would calculate 5.46 USD duties for a 12 USD item (Made in China, HS code: 7117.19). We didn’t make any changes and for the same 12 USD item the duties is now only 2.79 USD. A 49% decrease.
The old duties was close to what our shipping providers charges for the tariffs for DDP shipment, but the new tariffs are very off.
We contacted Shopify but they are not willing to look into it or explain why the way they calculate the duties have changed until we provide them with official US custom documents which only the shipping providers have.
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Replying because I’ve noticed the same thing, gonna back you up on this - not only are duty percentages a bit off, they change to a lower $ amount when I add an additional item to the cart!
The rate should be going up, not down!!
Also, most of my items are made in Canada, so I’ve had the new “Reduce rates when preferential treaties allow” switched on for weeks now and it’s been fine (country of origin & HS codes correct). Duty has been at $0 for those items, and duty was only charged on our few foreign-origin items. But suddenly now it’s completely random, entire categories of products are being charged, but not all. I’m guessing my issues started at the same time as yours, and I suspect it’s when they added the “Use postal duty rates into the United States” but obviously I can’t be sure.
So far I have tried:
- disabling and re-enabling the product
- disabling and re-enabling USA market
- disabling and re-enabling duty collection
- disabling and re-enabling treaties toggle
- postal duty has never been on, except for the 5 minutes I tried it out a couple of days ago
- removing Canada Post as a shipping method then adding back, just in case
- changing country of origin, then back again
- changing HS code, then back again
Didn’t affect a thing, so I’ve turned off duty collection for now.
I contacted support in the wee hours yesterday, we tried some things but nothing worked so the agent said it’s been escalated to the development team. Haven’t heard anything yet, will update if I do.
SOOOO FRUSTRATING, this whole thing. But I refuse to lose the USA market, they are most of my business.
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Same deal with us, our products are made in Canada and are USMCA compliant. They should normally fall under the preferential treaty (which they have been up until yesterday!) I temporarily turned off duty calculation and printing DDP labels through a 3rd party while providing USMCA certificate.
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They are “working” on it but I don’t understand how this is not fixed already. Major issue if you ask me.
From support last night:
”Danny Francis (Support Advisor): I totally got your point, you are correct, they should apply the duties 0% in CUSMA, I’m working with my team to verify the best next steps for you, you can count on me to resolve it”
I can imagine that if this is a nightmare for us, it’s got to be a nightmare for the developers. Still, it was working more or less fine.
@skoch1809 what gets me though is this part: “not willing to look into it or explain why the way they calculate the duties have changed until we provide them with official US custom documents which only the shipping providers have.” That doesn’t make sense, Shopify doesn’t need to see their duty rate tables to know if there’s a problem with calculations! They just need to look up what the default duty rate is. But there is the new toggle option in the Duties and import taxes settings for that market that Shopify very recently added:
“Use postal duty rates into the United States - postal duty rates are calculated for all shipments at checkout. If you use a commercial carrier, you cover any duty difference”
Has anyone tried playing with this? Does it make any (useful) difference? I tried it for like 5mins turned it off because I rarely use Canada Post now. Honestly, with the duty required on postal shipments, even on normally CUSMA-exempt items, it’s more expensive than some private ground services now (which are faster!).
No update verbally from Shopify support, but I decided to check today to see if duty had been fixed on some of my handmade (in Canada) items. Well, something has been done because most of my “problem” items are no longer having duty charged on them. I don’t know yet if the rates are accurate, so you might want to check your rates again to see if they’ve been corrected.
Interestingly, one of the items I was having issues with was a handmade replacement pocket watch chain, cart kept calculating duty for it. Technically it’s not a watch strap (HS 9113.20 base metal watch strap) nor is it technically jewelry (HS 7117.19 base metal jewelry chain), but i just tried changing the HS code to jewelry and guess what, no tariff. So they are either allowing HS code to override country of origin (which it shouldn’t!), or else they’re going code by code and fixed the 7117 heading, but haven’t got as far as 9113 yet. And that may be correct, because the bookmark that was having duty charged on it (HS code 8305.90) is fine now! 
Thanks to everyone who commented. I didn’t get any replied from Shopify but the tariffs went back to what it used to be so they must have fixed some of these issues.
It was fixed but the problem is back now *smh
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