It's very confusing. Even this thread makes that clear.
You may have noticed for months
ebay posted a heading on foreign stamp listings warning that U.S. customs duties will apply. How much those duties would be is not spelled out. Apparently, it was anyone's guess. Whether a tariff even applied to stamps was unclear. A lot of stamp purchases can be mailed in a small business envelope, so how would such a policy even work? Would it end up being a tariff on all incoming mail? Would the mail have to be opened and inspected? Some countries even said they would hold back all mail to the U.S. as a result of this. I've never seen anything like this except maybe in wartime. Are we at war? What is going on?
Even more confusing was
ebay's attempt to deal with this: If you agreed to purchase an item from a foreign seller it would be without knowing the cost of the tariff -- because
ebay did not know. And the foreign seller did not know, either. But, whatever that tariff was, you were still committed to buy the item, according to
ebay's rules. Would anyone commit to buying a car without knowing all the additional "fees" they had to pay? No sane person would do business this way -- but we were expected to.
When the tariff policy appeared on
ebay listings, I was buying from foreign dealers. We came to agreements to cancel some of those purchases. Had they not agreed, apparently
ebay would still have expected me to pay the foreign seller the full amount without dispute. Some foreign sellers even told me they would no longer sell to Americans due to the complete lack of clarity about U.S. tariffs.
No one can do business this way.The
ebay policy is not so much to blame. After all, it came from the unclear and confusing federal tariff policy. Every buyer and seller had to guess what the rules were. It was a very poorly-planned, very unclear policy that buyers, foreign sellers, and
ebay could never quite figure out.
It was so unclear, it led a number of countries to simply stop sending small packages to the U.S. out of frustration. If you can even imagine that sort of "embargo" on the U.S. That included stamp materials. A number of foreign dealers told me they were no longer selling to the U.S. until this was all straightened out. We were on the same "do not ship" list as North Korea! Who operates this way?
Now apparently tariffs on stamps no longer apply? I just checked various foreign stamp items on
ebay, and I don't see that warning about U.S. import tariffs on stamps anymore. So maybe it is gone? But maybe it will come back again? Tariffs come and go and come back again -- lately -- so you do never know. Or maybe I'll wake up from this dream and find things operating like normal international business. It does feel like Alice in Wonderland as if the Mad Hatter were running things.
It's certainly the most confusing on-again-off-again trade nonsense I've ever seen. And it initially caused problems for next year's big stamp show in Boston by discouraging some foreign dealers from even showing up. Would the enormous numbers of stamps they "imported" to the U.S. be tariffed? Apparently, no one knew. Will that problem now disappear? Will foreign dealers show up as normal? Or is it too late for many of them?
It's the silliest on-again, off-again foreign trade policy I've ever seen. It also may all have been unconstitutional for a president to do this much damage. He does not even appear to have this power except in a national "emergency". Congress has the power over "all bills for raising revenue," not the President. I hope now stamp collectors -- of all innocent people -- can go back to buying and selling without federal intervention. Wake me in three years when this confusing nonsense is finally over.
Posted 11/19/2025 4:34 pm
