Chapter 1: What recent Supreme Court ruling affects Amazon sellers?
We have major news for Amazon sellers. As of this morning, about an hour ago, the Supreme Court strikes down Trump's sweeping tariffs, upending central plank of economic agenda. So this is crazy. As most people know, in just a little bit of background, within the past year, Trump had put out a lot of reciprocal tariffs, as he called them, towards pretty much every single country.
Every country got at least a 10% tariff. China at times had upwards of 150% tariff.
Chapter 2: Which tariffs are still in place after the ruling?
on all goods being imported from that country. Now, it currently stands at about 35%, sometimes closer to 60%, depending on the category of product. But why is this happening? Essentially, and how, I should say, the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision centers on tariffs imposed under an emergency powers law
Chapter 3: How much money has been collected in tariffs and what are the refund implications?
including the sweeping reciprocal tariffs he levied on nearly every other country. So basically every type of tariff, and this, from what I have seen so far, affects about 50% of all the tariffs being levied.
Now, there are some tariffs that are still going to be allowed, such as some of the 5% and 10% ones that are already historic. So anything that was a tariff prior to basically 2025 is still going to be there.
Chapter 4: What immediate actions should Amazon sellers take following the tariff changes?
So for instance, China was at a stagnant 15%. prior to any of the Trump levy tariffs. This is one of those things where essentially we're also seeing a big question. Are people going to be refunded for the tariffs that they had already paid? And so right now they say the court majority did not address whether companies could get refunded for the billions they have collected in paid tariffs.
And you might wonder how many billions? About $133 billion has been collected in the last year from import taxes and tariffs, so to speak. So they did say taxes here, but it's a tariff. Slight difference, right? So the biggest thing here is the question, right? Are you going to get refunded? We don't know yet.
Nobody has decided to address that yet, but we do see that some really, really big companies, most namely Costco, is already actually lining up and saying, hey, we want to be the very first people. out the door to get that refund.
Chapter 5: What does the future hold for tariffs and Amazon sellers?
So they're already going to the courts about this. So we're going to learn if you as a seller could get refunded for any of the tariffs you had to pay last year, which would be a very nice little paycheck into your cashflow, I'm sure. But the bigger aspect here is that tariffs are no more.
So if you're somebody who has inventory on the way here, if you've been holding off and not buying as much inventory, I would do so now before anything else happens. You want to get this in and strike while the iron is hot. So last year I said it, nobody knows what's going to end up happening with these. And I didn't suspect that it was going to happen long-term or be a long-term play.
It looks like less than a year later, I was right within this. So if you're a seller, it's time to rejoice, have a little bit of a happy Friday dance, and I will keep you posted on any news with this.