Online Shopping

The de minimis exemption — a previously unknown trade policy that is now all over the news — is officially dead for US consumers starting today. That means all your purchases coming from abroad (not just China!) will be subject to important taxes you previously avoided.

Walmart Plus, Instacart, and your local grocery store have more competition now that Amazon is delivering perishable groceries in more places, with free delivery for Prime subscribers on orders of $25 or more.

If you’re Cassey Ho, AKA Blogilates, you get a few design patents and do some good old public shaming. I chatted with Ho about the world of online dupes for this Tuesday’s Vergecast episode.

Reuters tracked a sampling of Shein prices from April to July and — surprise! — items are now more expensive. Prices spiked in April following Shein’s pre-announced price increase and then dipped slightly, Reuters found. Now they’re creeping back up: a $31 order in April would have cost $69 last week.

Or would you? The weird little toys are a nightmare to buy so we took matters into our own hands.

The scoring models, which incorporate loan history from buy now, pay later services, like Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay, will exist alongside FICO’s standard credit score.

The retail giants are looking into ways they could use or issue stablecoins — a cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar or another asset, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. As noted by the WSJ, the move could allow Amazon and Walmart to receive payments faster, while avoiding fees from credit card transactions.

Six months after the coupon hunting extension Honey was accused of cheating shoppers and influencers, it appears the PayPal-owned tool is still losing users. According to 9to5Google, the number of Chrome extension users continues to drop — at one point 20 million people used the extension. Now, that number is down to 15 million.

In the midst of Donald Trump’s tariff chaos, prices are rising at retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Home Depot, according to data provided to The Verge by Bright Data, which tracks prices week over week. As of May 11th, for example, 21.5 percent of the 1.5 million tracked Amazon products had increased in price. Check out an interactive chart here.

As Donald Trump eliminates the exemption for shipments valued at $800 or less, Wired published a closer look at how Shein, the Chinese fast-fashion retailer that relied on that exemption to keep their prices dirt-cheap, tried to lobby their way out of it: spending millions of dollars on Washington lobbyists, hiring Trump administration alumni, and even sending their president, Donald Tang, to schmooze with the China hawks at the MAGA think tanks. (It didn’t work.)

Drop-shipping packages straight from China to shoppers’ homes was kind of the whole point of retailers like Temu. In response to Donald Trump’s tariffs, Temu now tells Wired that it’s switching to a “local fulfillment model” where orders come from US warehouses. With the de minimis exception officially dead (at least for now), it’s no surprise that retailers are scrambling — especially sites like Temu, whose wide product offerings depended on the exception.

Zulay Kitchen, which makes and sells kitchen gadgets, told CNBC that the company is “temporarily raising” the price of some of its products as it works to move production to India, Mexico, and other locations not subject to Trump’s 145 percent tariff on China.

The marketplace runs on small businesses all over the world — but Donald Trump’s tariffs are causing uncertainty. In a blog post today, Etsy CEO Josh Silverman said the company will add features like shopping pages surfacing domestic sellers, which could be useful for shoppers who want to avoid tariffs.

Donald Trump’s tariffs threaten to blow up Shein’s supply chain, which heavily depends on Chinese manufacturing. Bloomberg reports that the Chinese government didn’t like Shein’s plans to move some of its manufacturing out of China — Shein wants to avoid tariffs as much as it can, and the Chinese government reportedly is looking to minimize manufacturing job losses.

Donald Trump suspended a 100-year-old law this week that companies shipping online orders directly from China depended on. The de minimis exemption was used as a loophole by Temu, Shein, Amazon, and countless drop shipping operations. Check out my explainer below.