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Buying and selling with the US got harder. Here is what actually changed.
If you have tried to ship a card or a game across the Atlantic lately, you already know something shifted. For years the easy part of this space was that small packages just moved. A graded slab from Bern to a buyer in Texas went out, arrived, and that was that. That world is mostly gone, and I want to lay out what really happened, because there is a lot of noise and not much plain explanation.
The root of it is a US rule called de minimis. It used to let any shipment worth under 800 dollars enter the country duty free with almost no paperwork. That exemption is what made cheap, fast, low value international shipping possible. In 2025 it was removed. China and Hong Kong lost it first, and then on 29 August it ended for every country. Now every package, no matter how small, has to be declared and cleared, and duty has to be paid before it even arrives.
That single change broke the postal system overnight. The new US rules require duties to be prepaid before a parcel ships, which the old international postal framework was never built to do. So postal operators across the world simply stopped. Swiss Post suspended all goods shipments to the US from 26 August 2025. Letters and express courier items kept moving, but parcels with goods in them did not.
It came back in stages. From 4 September, private individuals could again send gift parcels to the US up to a value of about 100 dollars, which is roughly 80 chf. That number is the gift threshold a lot of people half remember, and it is real, just narrower than it sounds. Then from 22 September, business customers with a billing relationship could ship goods up to 800 dollars again using a new prepaid duty service. It carries a fee of 10 francs per parcel plus 2 percent of the customs amount, billed monthly a couple of months later. Anything above 800 dollars still has to go by standard post or a courier.
The tariff number on top of all this has been a moving target. Switzerland was hit with 39 percent in August 2025, then a framework deal brought it down to 15 percent in November, and then in February 2026 the US Supreme Court ruled that the legal basis for those tariffs was invalid. They were replaced almost overnight by a temporary 10 percent surcharge that is set to lapse in summer 2026 unless extended. The point is not the exact percentage on any given week. The point is that it keeps changing, and you cannot plan around a number that moves.
Here is the part that matters most for us. The de minimis suspension was built on a separate legal footing, so it survived the Supreme Court ruling untouched. Tariffs may come and go, but the structural change, every package declared and dutied regardless of value, is still in force. That is the part that actually changed how we trade.
In practice, selling into the US now means prepaying duty, getting your customs codes right, and accepting delays and extra fees on every shipment. Buying from the US is a different kind of friction. Plenty of American sellers have just stopped offering international shipping because it became too much hassle, so the harder part is often finding someone willing to send at all. And anything that does come in faces Swiss import VAT on arrival.
None of this makes cross border collecting impossible. It just means the complexity has to live somewhere, and increasingly it lives with the platforms rather than with you. This is where companies like eBay quietly do the heavy lifting. Through their international shipping programs you hand the parcel off once, and they take over the customs filing, the duty prepayment, and the paperwork that would otherwise grind a private sale to a halt. You see a single landed price, the buyer sees a single landed price, and the friction gets absorbed in the middle.
So the honest picture is not doom. It is that doing this on your own, parcel by parcel through the post, has gotten genuinely complicated, while doing it through a marketplace that has built the duty machinery for you is still very workable. My advice is simple. For anything going to or coming from the US, lean on the platforms that handle the customs side, know the thresholds before you commit, and treat the rare direct deal as the one that needs the extra care. The space is still wide open. You just want the right rails under you.
Updated June 2026
