Why TradeWind exists

We've been selling from the UK to American buyers for roughly ten years. Doormats, custom stamps, BookTok bookshelf signs — three UK Star Seller Etsy shops, 80,000+ verified reviews between them, and a steady half of our parcels going to addresses in the United States.

For the first nine of those years the maths on US shipping worked. Royal Mail Tracked from a UK warehouse landed at a Florida door for under £10, the buyer paid the listed price, that was the end of it. We thought it was just how international ecommerce worked.

Then on 29 August 2025, Executive Order 14324 ended the US $800 de minimis threshold. Overnight, every parcel needed full customs entry and pre-paid duty. The incumbent DDP carriers spotted the gap and raised prices — our typical 1kg parcel went from ~£10 to £40+ in a fortnight. We watched our US shipping costs roughly quadruple while our American customers started getting handed duty bills at the door, refusing parcels, leaving one-star reviews. Nine years of US sales were suddenly at risk.

So we did the negotiating ourselves. Combined our volume with two other UK ecommerce founders we'd known on Discord for years. Spent the autumn of 2025 in calls with UPS — explaining the lane, the parcel mix, the duty mechanics — until we'd negotiated a Worldwide Economy DDP reseller contract good enough that we could quote our American customers a single all-in price again. It worked. Our refusal rate went back to near-zero. Our margins came back. Our customers stopped getting nasty surprises.

TradeWind is that contract, opened up. We're real UK ecommerce sellers, not a faceless platform. We use TradeWind to ship our own parcels every morning before the rest of the team's online — if anything breaks for you it breaks for us first, and we fix it the same day. 50% of our shipments still go to the US. We know the lane. We negotiated the rates. We pass them on at cost plus the bare minimum to keep the lights on.

If you're a UK seller whose US shipping just got expensive — that's why we exist. You shouldn't have to negotiate a UPS contract, build customs software, or stop selling to your American customers just because the rules changed. We did the hard bit. Use it.