I'm completely on board with the idiocy of the tariffs.
I'm NOT on board with absolving ScubaGaskets of any responsibility; they have chosen the easy path of just letting the end customer pay the bill instead of working out a way to ease the pain. It demonstrably can be done, as Aliexpress has shown.
also work in international logistics.
Tariffs are, and always have been paid by the importer of record. The import tariffs are based on the FOB cost of the materials and Cyprus is subject to 15% tariff along with the rest of the EU. Any charges above that are done by DHL for dealing with the hassle of all of the paperwork and frankly the $18 that
@Scuba-74 paid to clear it is a steal and I wish we could pay so little for our imports. There was mention of other international imports that didn't have it, the exemption for de minimis was suspended on 8/29/25 so anything before that would probably have come under that threshold.
As far as what they could do to ease the pain, the only way to do it is to have distributorships setup and frankly they are nowhere near big enough to do that on their own like Ali has. They could go through someone like
@DiveGearExpress who has been doing that for the industry for a couple of decades now and stop selling direct and then DGX would bring in pallet size orders like they do now and file the paperwork in bulk but it would require Scubagaskets to have stock in the US and have that stock managed by someone and you're going to pay for that as well.
I don't support these tariffs, they've been a nightmare for our business and continue to be, but importing goods is a paperwork nightmare and always has been if you are the importer of record and this is where the value in companies like DGX, Northeast Scuba Supply, Cave Adventurers, Dive Right in Scuba, etc. that are bringing in large enough orders to have economy of scale with this and act as unofficial distributors has worked in this type of industry.