Ship to America
the way that pays.

DDP and duty since de-minimis ended

Since 29 August 2025, every commercial parcel entering the USA attracts import duty regardless of value. The $800 de-minimis exemption — which used to let low-value parcels clear duty-free — ended under Executive Order 14324, and an origin-based US tariff surcharge now sits on top (10% for UK-made goods — the July 2026 successor to the expired Section 122 baseline). For UK sellers that means the old "just post it and hope" approach is dead: your buyer will be billed at the door unless you pre-pay the duty yourself.

DDP — Delivered Duty Paid — is the fix. You pre-pay the US import duty at checkout, so the parcel arrives with nothing left to pay. No courier phone call, no held package, no one-star review from a customer hit with a surprise bill. TradeWind calculates the duty per HS code from live USITC tariff data, shows it before you commit, and pre-pays it to UPS so the quote your buyer saw is the final cost.

The alternative — DDU (Delivered Duty Unpaid) — leaves your American buyer to pay duty plus a carrier handling fee before release, and it's the single biggest driver of refused parcels on the UK→US lane. Read what de-minimis ending changed and how UPS Worldwide Economy DDP keeps the door bill at zero.

Commercial parcels vs bulk shipping

Commercial shipping means booking a DDP label with a commercial invoice for every order you sell across the Atlantic — one parcel, one customer, tracked door to door. Bulk shipping is the same thing at scale: printing many individual DDP labels in one pass rather than freight or container loads. Both run on the same UPS Worldwide Economy DDP service; the difference is how many labels you generate at once.

TradeWind is built for ecommerce parcels — 100g jewellery, 2kg doormats, 5kg homeware boxes — each with its own commercial invoice, up to 30kg, 4–7 working days to the 48 contiguous states plus DC. If you ship pallets or full containers, a freight forwarder is the right tool. If you ship parcels one order at a time, or a hundred at once, this is. Start with B2B USA shipping for the commercial overview.

For high-volume days, import your orders, let automation rules assign services by weight, value, country and SKU, and print a batch as ZPL or PDF. Customs data is auto-filled from your catalog, so 200 parcels take minutes rather than an afternoon of retyping HS codes. See bulk parcel shipping UK to USA for the batch workflow.

What it costs: rates and duty

Carriage starts from £12.80 per parcel on UPS Worldwide Economy DDP, with business rates below that by volume. US import duty is added per HS code on top and pre-paid at checkout — so £12.80 is the label price, not an all-in figure. Retail carriers charge £24 (Royal Mail PDDP) to £75 (DHL Express) for the same lane and usually leave duty for your buyer to pay at the door.

Price a real parcel on the UK to USA shipping calculator, check the weight bands on UPS Worldwide Economy UK rates, or estimate the duty portion with the UK to US duty calculator. For plans and the optional BYOA route, see pricing.

Plug in your store

TradeWind connects to Shopify, WooCommerce, Etsy, eBay, BigCommerce and ShipStation, so your orders flow in without copy-paste. Connect a store and each order is quoted on UPS Worldwide Economy DDP with duty calculated per HS code before you pay. Where an integration is still clearing OAuth or marketplace approval, you can upload a CSV or paste an order list in the meantime, so no lane is blocked while a connector goes live.

Customs data pulls from your product catalog rather than the order source, so the HS code and declared value are consistent on every commercial invoice. That's the difference between a clean US clearance and a parcel held for a query. The B2B USA shipping page lists the current integration status.

A business account with no monthly fee

A TradeWind business account costs nothing per month. There's no subscription, no minimum volume and no contract — you pay per label at business rates that sit below our public £12.80 card, and nothing when you're not shipping. Subscription rivals charge £20–£150 a month before you print a single label; that fixed cost quietly eats your margin in a quiet week. We don't charge it.

The account gives you saved shipper details, store integrations, bulk printing and per-lane quoting for higher volumes. If you already hold your own negotiated UPS contract, the optional BYOA plan is a flat £29/month and books against your own rates with the full TradeWind toolkit on top — no per-label markup. That's the only paid tier, and it's genuinely optional.

Open a free account on the business shipping account (UK) page, or compare both routes on pricing.

Customs and HS codes

Every product you ship to the USA needs a Harmonized System (HS) code — the classification that sets the US import duty rate for that item. Get it right and duty is calculated correctly and pre-paid; get it wrong and the parcel can be held, re-rated or returned. TradeWind stores the HS code against your catalog once, then auto-fills the commercial invoice on every label so you never retype it and every parcel declares the same value and classification.

A compliant UK→US commercial invoice needs an accurate goods description, the HS code, quantity, declared value, country of origin, and your business details. UPS handles the customs entry; you supply clean data. For UK-origin goods there may be a preferential-origin declaration worth adding — but the baseline requirement is an honest, consistent invoice on every parcel.

Classify a product on the HS code lookup, see the exact duty rate on the UK to US duty calculator, and walk the full paperwork in the UK to US customs guide.