Whoever imports pays the tarriff. If you order something over the internet from someone not in the US, that's the consumer.

There is a lot more direct consumer ordering from international vendors now than there was 20 years ago of course, for obvious reasons.

Note Aug 29th is also the end of the "de minimus" rules for import duties, where a shipment worth less than $800 was exempt from import taxes and duties. Some tariffs and other import taxes have always existed, but that's why you rarely saw them when ordering consumer goods internationally to the USA, if it was worth less than $800 they were skipped. That's going away, you'll be paying import taxes on every international shipment you order directly as a consumer, even if it's a $25 t-shirt -- exactly how you pay these, at what point they are calculated by who (even how to calculate them?), and who invoices you how and when as a consumer -- well that's what nobody including international shippers have figured out yet, which is what the OP is saying means they can't really ship internationally to consumers in the USA for the time being. it's gonna be a clusterfuck.

Turns out maybe there's a reason there aren't usually major changes to whole structure of import taxes made with only months notice, and tweaks and changes to them still being made only weeks/days before implementation, with no real implementation guidance provided?

Yes. But let me clarify... the order was from a US merchant and shipped to Canada. Apparently at the time we put matching reciprocal tarrifs in place (some were since removed, I'm not sure whether these included). I assumed the aluminum and steel tarrifs were only on bulk raw materials, but apparently because there was no certified "% content" declaration, customs treated the whole shipment as metal.

Historically I buy a lot of high-end goods from the US on an annual basis, but after this incident I'll be actively avoiding doing so and the surprises that entails, until things get sane again.

It’s fundamentally how tariffs work. The importer pays the cost. If it’s a finished good to a consumer, they pay the full amount. If it’s a finished good to a retailer, it’s the wholesale cost. If it’s on components used domestically, it’s the wholesale cost of those components.

In the latter two cases, it’s up to the domestic supply chain to decide how and and how much of those costs get passed on to consumers.

That's what has been said since the beginning of this madness. People don't understand how this works, and took the word of a corrupt madman.

It ends up being like sales tax in the US. It is the store that pays the sales tax(note 1), but I have never seen a store just include the tax in the price, they always pass it on as an extra charge to the end customer. And this may not be a bad thing. It is probably good for the general public to be explicitly reminded how much tax they are paying.

1: You don't add up and pay the tax board every month right? In fact this is the central theme to successfully collecting taxes, never collect them directly from the public if possable. That is a hard thankless task. It is much easier to steal them from the much more easily policed companies, before the public sees the money in the form of income tax or when they buy in the form of a sales tax. As a specific example remember the "use" tax, you were supposed to do just that, add up and pay the sales tax for things you bought out of your sales tax jurisdiction, this proved impossible to collect so with the massive increase in sales out of the tax jurisdiction(cough, amazon, cough) the courts ordered that each company had to now keep track of and pay the sales tax for every infernal piddling little sales tax area, a huge hassle for them, but that's not the states problem and it is much easier to enforce than having each person do it.

Please for the love all that is good and holy tell me you’re joking. If not, HOW THE HELL DID YOU THINK THIS WORKED???

Everything is paid by the customer. As a manufacturer I can temporaly absorb some costs to keep prices steady, but at some point, I have to adjust prices to maintain a reasonable margin.

So yes, I will pay for my country's tariffs and you will pay for yours.

It's a bad scenario where things are more expensive and both manufacturers and customers get harmed. The only ones winning are, as always, intermediaries.

Hope you forgot your /s... Otherwise, better go get a clue-stick somewhere.

And this is the ignorance we have to fight against.

I'll repeat this for those in the back:

TARIFFS ARE PAID BY THE CITIZENS OF THE COUNTRY DOING THE TARIFFS.

TARRIFFS ARE NOT PAID BY OTHER COUNTRIES.

This is excessive and illegal taxation without representation. Congratulations, party of low taxes, you now have socialist-like taxes without any of the socialist benefits.

Um, yes! Who do you think was going to pay it?

The Trump tariffs are the biggest tax increase in the lower and middle classes ever.