Tariff Costs Understate the Impacts on Small Businesses

The United States has collected a staggering amount of (mostly illegal) new tariffs – yet even these drastically understate the impacts. Why? You don’t collect tariffs on canceled or reduced orders.

Preliminary results from the new We Pay the Tariffs survey found that tariffs have forced over 60% of respondents to reduce inventory and/or import values.

In practice, this means scaling back product lines, having less inventory onhand, and rethinking whether they can continue operating at all. Fixed costs remain even if imports slow due to tariffs. 

In the words of several respondents:

• “We've discontinued most of our items until the tariffs go away or we go out of business.”

• “The tariffs have reduced our import volumes, resulting in smaller allocations from our producers and reduced margins and overall profitability of our company. We took a loss for the first time in our company's history because of the tariffs.”

  
  

• “While our overall tariff total is fairly small, we lost about a half million dollars in sales because we just stopped ordering. We couldn’t afford to [pay out] the tariff cash.”

• “The worst thing as a manufacturer and seller is to not have any goods to sell. You lost all the momentum you've built on Amazon, Meta so you still have to keep going. Just with less.”

These are the types of experiences we seek to capture in our new survey – with the end goal of publishing a major tariff report. The more responses received, the more robust our results will be. 

Please add your experience by answering now and/or sharing this link with others that might be willing to respond. 

Take the Survey