De Minimis Hit Zero in the US: How to Claim Back Duty Refunds Cross-Border Sellers Are Missing

Nearly a year after the US eliminated the $800 de minimis exemption, a lot of cross-border sellers are still pricing as if the old rules apply — and leaving real money uncollected in the process. That's the core takeaway from a recent Watson Weekly interview between Rick Watson and Matthew Merrilees, who runs North America for cross-border commerce platform Global-e and spent two decades on the operations side of the business at DHL before that.

Why Payment Acquiring, Not Shipping, Is the Biggest Hidden Cost in Cross-Border Sales

Ask most brands what makes international selling expensive, and the reflexive answer is shipping. Merrilees puts it lower on the list. In his ordering, payment acquiring — the multi-gateway, local-acquiring infrastructure needed to actually convert an international shopper — is the largest line item most operators never see broken out, buried inside a blended processing rate. Shipping, duty, and tax come second and third.

How De Minimis Rules Changed in the US, EU, and UK

The regulatory picture has shifted enough, in enough directions at once, that pricing built even a few months ago is probably stale:

• United States — De minimis dropped from $800 to zero, meaning every parcel now needs a full HS code before a landed price can even be quoted. Merrilees counts roughly 75 separate regulatory changes on the US side alone.
• European Union — A flat €3 charge per unique HS code now applies to anything under the €150 threshold, a cost that stacks fast on sitewide promotions spanning mixed catalogs.
• United Kingdom — Its own threshold sits at £135, with its own distinct rules rather than mirroring the EU or US approach.
• Mexico — The Section 321-through-Mexico workaround that brands were building supply chains around as recently as eighteen months ago is now closed entirely.

EcomCrew has tracked pieces of this shift as it unfolded, including how the end of de minimis hit platforms like Etsy and eBay and how sellers previously used Section 321 to legally minimize duties before the exemption disappeared.

How to Claim Back Duty and Tax Refunds on International Returns

The most actionable point in the interview has nothing to do with pricing forward — it's about money already spent that sellers can claim back and mostly aren't. Walk through what happens on an ordinary international return: a shopper sends a jacket back, and the brand refunds the product, the shipping, and the duty and tax that came with it. Those duties and taxes are recoverable from customs authorities, but Merrilees' experience is that almost no one files for them.

What Is CBP Duty Drawback and How Much Can Sellers Recover

The same opportunity exists on the import side through CBP's duty drawback program, which allows importers to recover up to 99% of duties paid on merchandise that's later exported or destroyed unused. It's a permanent program, not something tied to the current tariff environment, and it isn't new. What's new is how much bigger the unclaimed pile has gotten now that far more transactions carry duty in the first place. Watson's framing was blunt: nobody puts drawback on a growth slide, so it sits there uncollected because the filing process is genuinely tedious — Merrilees compared the CBP approval queue to the DMV.

The One Metric Cross-Border Sellers Should Check This Week

Asked for the single metric an operator should look at first, Merrilees didn't offer a shortcut: profitability broken out by country, at that level of granularity, or you're not actually looking closely enough to catch where the math has quietly gone upside down.

For sellers who set international pricing once during the scramble last fall and haven't touched it since, that's the practical prompt here — not just whether landed costs have changed, but whether anyone has gone back to check what's recoverable on the refunds and imports already on the books.