How I Got Around U.S. Import Restrictions (Legally) by Visiting Canada

Tariffs and other restrictions on imports imposed by the Trump Administration have upended international commerce. Last August, I wrote about what travelers would need to know about the end of the de minimis exception for shipments from foreign sellers. Back then, many countries had issued a moratorium on processing shipments to the United States until they figured out the logistics. Many countries have restarted shipments, but the added complexities have driven foreign retailers to stop shipping their products to buyers in the United States. The end of the de minimis exception is the big one. Until the exception was ended, buying lower-value products from foreign sellers was relatively straightforward. Packages might get held up a day or two while customs verified their contents and value, but buying products from abroad was still pretty simple. The main reason for the exception was to keep customs resources from being tied up with low-value items and small duty amounts. Customs would still screen packages to make sure nobody imported a Rolls-Royce they claimed was a bottle of wine, but otherwise there wasn’t much fuss for smaller shipments. Now, there is.When I visited Grasse, France, in 2021, I joined a fragrance workshop at Galimard, one of France’s oldest fragrance manufacturers. There, we sat in front of a perfumer’s “organ,” a custom-made desk with 126 “notes” of fragrance, organized on three tiers: base, heart, and top, and arranged from left to right from masculine to feminine, with neutral fragrances in the middle. During a blissful 90 minutes, I blended 17 of those notes into my own fragrance. I chose cedarwood, tuberose, and sandalwood for the base; bamboo, fig, and tiaré for the heart; and cucumber, pineapple, and English tea for the top notes. If I do say so myself, it’s intoxicating. I slapped a label on my bespoke 100 milliliters and named it Jardin du Ciel (Sky Garden). Then I noted the recipe and the personal serial number my fragrance was assigned so I could reorder. When I ran out, all I had to do was fill out a form on Galimard’s website, and a technician at their atelier would mix a new bottle and ship it to me. Continue Reading Article After Our Video Recommended Fodor’s Video It worked great until the end of the de minimis exception. Now, Galimard, like many other retailers, has suspended shipments to the United States, largely because the import duties U.S. customs now requires result in many delayed and returned packages, which adds expense for the company. Although import duties on foreign shipments are standard practice in much of the world, U.S. buyers aren’t used to them and are more likely to refuse shipments. What’s more, retailers typically can’t estimate customs duties at the point of sale, which creates further confusion for buyers. So, what was I to do? I couldn’t run out of cologne. With a little bit of sleuthing, I discovered that Galimard would still ship to Canada, and I had a visit to Calgary on the books. I knew my hotel, the Fairmont Palliser, so I used its address for shipping and added a note with my arrival date so the hotel staff would know to associate it with my reservation when it arrived. A few days before the package was scheduled to arrive in Calgary, I got an e-mail from UPS, which I’d been expecting. Canadian import duties for my cologne amounted to $29.53 CAD, or about $21 U.S. I paid from a link in the e-mail, and my package was cleared by Canada Customs the next day. When I checked in at the hotel, it was waiting for me in all its fragrant glory. On returning to the United States, U.S. Customs considered the purchase made in Canada, and it counted toward the $800 duty-free allowance I get as a returning U.S. resident who’s been away longer than 48 hours. How to Ship to a Foreign DestinationThis can be an effective workaround when a merchant won’t ship to the United States, but shipping an item to a hotel in Canada is one of the more straightforward options. Canada’s standard import duties on foreign products are relatively low (the duty I paid to Canada customs was within a few dollars of what I would have paid to import it to the U.S. had Galimard decided it was worth the trouble), and five-star hotels there are accustomed to receiving packages on behalf of guests. It gets trickier if you’re traveling to a country with different import rules. The U.S. allows returning residents to bring honey without restriction (provided they declare it), but if you’re traveling to French Polynesia, it’s not allowed in, either in your luggage or in the mail, so it’s not a backdoor to getting those Mānuka honey products from New Zealand (they’ll ship to the U.S. anyway). It can also get complicated if you’re not staying in a hotel. Mail facilities aren’t typically available at vacation rentals (unless they’re a condo-hotel with a front desk) or Airbnb-style accommodations (though you can always ask your host). Finally, it’s always worth doing some online searching to find out what sort of import duties you’ll be on the hook for. Many retailers won’t share that information for fear of giving the wrong estimate or because regulations may change, but a quick internet search can usually give a ballpark of how much duty you might expect to pay. Even if you’re traveling to Canada, it’s worth checking the duty amount and the sales tax for the province you’re visiting. I ultimately paid Canada’s federal tariff of 6.5% for French fragrances plus the federal Goods and Services Tax of 5%. I lucked out by being in Calgary, because Alberta is the only province in Canada that doesn’t tack on additional provincial taxes. In other provinces, the total tax levy can be up to 10 points higher (in neighboring British Columbia, for example, I would have paid 18.5% in taxes and duties). If you’re not traveling to a foreign destination (Canada is probably the easiest example for U.S. travelers), there are also third-party re-shipment services out there, where you can have foreign purchases sent from a shipper that doesn’t want to fuss with U.S. import protocols, and the third-party service will handle it for you—for a fee. For me, all it took was an international air ticket and a little bit of patience for the procedure.