We, who shop on Aliexpress have to remember that a small percentage of the consumer population in the United States actually use Aliexpress. For several years, I hadn't even heard of or read about the $800 de minimis streamlined custom process. 20+ years ago, when I owned a small bicycle business, I looked into purchasing bike parts directly from abroad. Even back then, by the time I added up the duties, tariffs and fees for the volume of parts I wanted to import, it ended up being more expensive than purchasing from my distributors/dealers.
Aliexpress is/was the best thing that happened to the individual consumer, but this is being taken away from us. The USA loves our Capitalistic system where a lot of people get a cut of items you purchase as they are passed though one hand to another. None of these extra steps is a value add to the consumer, but we have to pay this anyways.
One of the things that has changed the whole profit system for small businesses in the domestic cost of shipping. Used to be you would pay around 6% to 10% of the value of the items you purchased. These days, shipping costs are sometimes 60% to 100% and more of the value of the item you want to ship! Shipping has become a monopoly for UPS and Fedex.
Many stores do not even hold any inventory these days. Almost everything is dropped shipped from a warehouse directly to you or the store when you order online. The online store gets a cut, the shippers get a cut, the warehouse gets the biggest cut, and warehouses are usually owned by a large corporation, so the profit rolls upward.
I know perhaps 1 in 50 friends that regularly used Aliexpress. A lot of us on Chinertown are a different type of consumer. How many people do you know that build their one bicycle? How many cyclists have more that 2 bicycles? In general, our government could care less about a bunch of cyclists wanting a good price on bike parts. But the large corporations want to ring out every penny they can from us, and they are the ones setting the rules.
