In your standing meeting every morning, someone asks the only question that matters: “What’s the total landed cost for this HTS code from China, including Section 301, reciprocal tariffs, and AD/CVD?”
They want a hard number before the call ends. Not “I’ll get back to you.” Not “Let me pull the spreadsheet.” A number. Right now.
In real life, here’s what that looks like. Take a lithium-ion pack, HTS 8507.60.0020 (lithium-ion storage batteries, Others) coming from Shenzhen next month. The base duty used to be 3.4 percent. Then Layer 301 added 25 percent. Then the new reciprocal tranche in April 2025 added another 30 percent on top. Then last week U.S. Commerce quietly finalized a 48.53 percent countervailing duty (CVD), which is a type of tariff imposed to offset foreign government subsidies that make imported goods artificially cheap, on half the factories you use.
Do the math and you can easily owe more in duties than the parts you want are worth. It’s not uncommon to see $300,000 invoices turn into $750,000 when the container hits the pier. Miss one layer and you just ate into your margin.
Most hardware compliance teams are still doing the three-tab shuffle: one for the USITC site, one for CROSS rulings, one for the Google Sheet that Jason built in 2019 and swears still works.
Ten minutes later you’ve got three different answers and everyone’s stressing, while the factory in China is messaging you on WeChat asking why the purchase order hasn’t been revised yet.
The groups that aren’t losing their minds anymore figured out it’s not about being smarter than Washington, it’s about being faster than the chaos.
It’s also helpful to keep a couple of “what-if” scenarios ready for every big or important part number:
- Straight from China (the painful one)
- Rerouted through Vietnam with a quick certificate of origin
- Mexico-landing, first, then trucked across under USMCA
- Stuck in a foreign trade zone (FTZ) so at least the duty clock doesn’t start ticking yet
Compliance teams want one click to see the exact dollar difference. That’s the whole game now. Nobody knows what tweet or Federal Register notice is coming next Thursday, but the teams who can answer the landed-cost question in ninety seconds flat are the ones still sleeping at night. The rest are bleeding cash and yelling at spreadsheets.
So if you’re still jumping between tabs each morning, find a reliable source you trust to get the whole stack, and build those three or four escape routes you know you’re going to need. Because the rules are going to change again, guaranteed.
