Wednesday, October 14 · Issue #5 · 6 min read.
Good morning.
Until last Thursday, getting your tariff money back meant hiring a lawyer and spending most of it on the lawyer. That stopped being true.
IN TODAY'S ISSUE
The trade court turned the refund case into a class action, and the right move is now to do nothing
A fantasy series became a retail season with a date on it
Your customer is trading down inside your own catalog
Let's get into it.
TRADE
You don’t need your own lawsuit to get the tariff money back
The trade court turned the lead tariff refund case into a class action on Thursday. The class covers every company that paid the emergency-powers tariffs as the importer of record between February 2025 and February of this year. There's no form to file, no fee, and no way to opt out. Every other default we've written about this year has gone the other way.
In September we wrote that chasing one of these refunds through the courts cost more in legal fees than most small importers were owed, so it wasn't a case; it was a donation. That was the right advice for three weeks.
Companies that already filed their own case are excluded, and filing one is exactly what a careful owner would do about now. Ask your broker or attorney before you sign anything, because that signature moves you out of the group that doesn't have to do a thing.
Levi's told investors on Thursday that it put most of its tariff refund back into the business rather than into margin, and reported online sales up 10% in the same breath. Large importers got this money months ago and are spending it on growth going into the holidays.
No money has moved for anybody else yet. The court still has to order Customs to reprocess the entries, and the government is expected to appeal, so get your paperwork straight rather than plan around a number. Customs has already rejected 6.2 million entries from its own refund process, mostly because a filing missed its deadline or left out a tariff code. A rejected entry isn't a refund sitting in a queue. It's a refund somebody has to go back and fix, and that somebody is you.
Bottom line: Pull your entry records for that stretch and find out which ones Customs accepted and which ones bounced. Then don't file anything until you know whether you're already covered.
DEMAND
A fantasy series is about to become a retail season
A fantasy romance series that has sold more than 75 million copies has its sixth book out on October 27, and retailers and brands spent last week stacking product around it. Target is running midnight release events in stores with a gift attached. An underwear brand built 5 exclusive prints and spent 18 months doing it.
A fragrance brand took four scents it already sold, renamed them after places in the books, repackaged them, and put them out at $29.99. No new formula, no new supplier, no 18 months. The product was already on the shelf wearing the wrong clothes.
A cultural moment with a publication date on it is the cheapest demand available to anybody, because the audience assembles itself and tells you in advance when it will be standing there. You can develop product for it, which is slow and costs real money, or you can re-dress something you already own and already know sells.
Your version isn't this book. It's whichever date your own customers organize themselves around: a game release, a season opener, a film, a convention, a school term, a holiday nobody merchandises properly. Those dates are published a year out, and almost nobody in a small shop puts them on a calendar.
Bottom line: Pick one date between now and February, and find something in your catalog you could re-dress for it. New name, new photography, a themed bundle, a landing page that speaks the language of whoever is already waiting for that date. Don't develop product for a moment that's two weeks away, because that's how you end up holding inventory for a trend that ended.
PRICING
Your customers traded down inside your own catalog
Somebody ran the numbers on 4.5 million TikTok Shop products last week and found the median top seller costs about $40. More than two-thirds of the revenue goes to things you put on your body, wear, or eat, and beauty alone takes close to a third. Ordinary marketplace assortment barely registers. $40 is the number somebody will spend without putting the phone down to think about it.
The deal event said the same thing from the other end of the market. A beauty device brand's best seller was its $99 starter model, and it won on revenue and units. The expensive machines in the same catalog weren't close. A skincare brand put its sets out at a modest discount and watched them become close to 70% of everything it sold on day one.
Discount depth did not move this customer. Price point did. The shopper who trades down isn't leaving your store; she's buying the cheaper thing in it, and if the cheapest credible thing in your catalog is $180, she's doing that somewhere else.
Bottom line: Look at which product made you the most money during the event, not which one moved the most units, and make sure you can keep it in stock through December. Then set your Black Friday floor this week while the evidence is in front of you, because everybody's instinct in the third week of November is to cut deeper, and that's the lever that wasn't working. If you have nothing at all in the band where people buy without thinking, that gap is a product decision for January, not a promo decision for next month.
Steal this 👀
Open your own store on your phone, in a private browsing window, and try to buy something.
Not your laptop, and not your phone with your own login and your card already saved. A private window on a phone is the only way to see what a cold visitor from Instagram gets, which is a cookie banner, then an age check, then a country selector, then an email popup, all before the product. Your returning customers push through that because they already trust you. A first-timer goes back to the app she came from.
Two things to look for while you're in there. Count how much of the screen is left for the product once your sticky header and your add-to-cart bar have taken their share. Then try to pinch-zoom a product photo far enough to read a size chart or an ingredient list, which is the moment most mobile buyers decide whether to risk it.
Cost: nothing. Time: 10 minutes. Do it before your traffic triples in November, not after.
FROM FULFILLYN
Outgrowing your 3PL? Get matched with a better one.
Missed ship dates, surprise fees, slow replies. If any of that sounds familiar, tell us what you sell and how much you ship. We will match you with vetted 3PLs that fit your volume, channels, and budget.
✓ 250 vetted 3PLs across 391 locations
✓ 200+ brands advised
✓ Independent: we work for you, not for one warehouse
Or just reply to this email with what you ship.
eBay starts hiding electronics listings today.
Anything wireless offered to US buyers needs a valid FCC ID from October 13, and listings without one may be hidden from search or frozen so you can't revise or relist them. The list is broad: phones, laptops, tablets, routers, drones, Bluetooth anything, smartwatches, two-way radios, and remote-control toys. The federal rule behind it exempts devices that have already been owned once, and eBay hasn't put in writing how it will treat them. If you sell secondhand electronics, screenshot your live listings today so you can tell later what disappeared.
Your customer is financing Christmas, and so are you.
Long-term borrowing costs hit their highest level since 2002 on Wednesday, and half of holiday shoppers say they will borrow to pay for gifts they can't currently afford. The same rate sits under your line of credit. Find out what yours is pegged to before you place the January reorder, because a variable rate you signed for in 2024 is a different product now.
Shopify now hands your "was" price to AI shopping agents.
A changelog entry on Friday says your compare-at price gets shared through Shopify's catalog to the AI agents that shop on a customer's behalf. Plenty of stores use that field decoratively, with a crossed-out number nothing was ever sold at. A machine reading it has no way to tell the difference and will quote it as a saving. Go look at what's in the compare-at field on your twenty best sellers.
Texas is moving to stop taxing the fees your marketplace charges you. The state comptroller ordered staff to strip the tax out of the rule at the end of September, and sellers are only now hearing about it. Since last October, Texas has treated part of what Amazon, eBay, or Etsy charges you as a taxable service, with 80% of the fee taxed. Nothing has changed yet. The amendment still has to be published, sit through a 30-day comment window, and be adopted, so keep paying it and keep the records.
Meta stopped running TikTok's ads, and anything pointing at TikTok. The block started on Thursday across seven countries, including the US, and it covers outside advertisers whose campaigns send people to TikTok, not just TikTok's own ads. Meta said it doesn't have to run ads for a competitor trying to pull people off its apps. If your Instagram creative drives traffic to your TikTok Shop, check that campaign.
Ads inside ChatGPT cost about six times a Google click.
A measurement firm's head of insights put the cost that far above Google's, and well above Meta's, and said most of the sales the ads produce would have happened anyway. Around 1,400 advertisers ran them in August, and the biggest spenders are a credit card company and a travel site, not anyone selling physical products. Q4 is the wrong quarter to learn an unproven channel on your own money.
Facebook Marketplace's pay-only-if-it-sells ads may charge you anyway. Sellers are reporting charges with no sale attached, and the terms contradict each other across three different screens in the same setup flow. One test showed a $10 budget on the confirmation page and a $400 daily budget in the ad details, with the campaign set to chase messages rather than purchases. There's no help page documenting any of it. If you've boosted a Marketplace listing, open the ad details (not the confirmation screen) and read the terms there.
That's the week.
If you do only one thing after reading this, find out whether your company paid the emergency-powers tariffs as importer of record between February 2025 and February this year, and don't let anyone file a case on your behalf until you know whether you're already covered by the class. It's the only item here where the money moves toward you.
See you next Wednesday.