Sent Items #201: Tuesday, September 3, 2025

I hope everyone had a nice Labor Day Weekend! Seems like many of you were shopping:

New unboxing video out, a call to action to send us more fun stuff to unbox (watch it, I hope you’ll enjoy…)!

Last week’s Matt’s Chats can be found below and a few shorts here (link).

While you watch any of our content on YouTube, be sure to subscribe to our channel!

I was proud to be quoted in an NBC News article last week on the changes to de minimis (link). U.S. shoppers' orders canceled as world shuts down some American-bound shipments. The end of the “de minimis” exemption for cheap parcel shipments, nearly a century old, is prompting countries everywhere to suspend shipments to the U.S.

Obviously this may not be the end of the conversation on tariffs. Late last week the Court of Appeals ruled that Trump’s tariffs are illegal. This will likely head to the Supreme Court for an ultimate decision.

The U.S. government has collected $100s of Billions of dollars from tariffs (not trillions, as Trump claimed in his post yesterday). I’d take the bet that they won’t be issuing refunds.

Flexport, BlackRock Team Up on $250M in Logistics Financing (link). BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is teaming up with Flexport to expand the digital logistics platform’s financing options for companies facing higher tariff costs and other trade-related strains on cash flow.

The $250 million from BlackRock-managed funds and accounts will double Flexport’s lending capacity. The freight company’s financial services arm, Flexport Capital, has provided more than $2 billion since it started in 2017. Steeper global trade costs are boosting demand from Flexport’s customers for term loans, tariff financing and asset-based lines of credit to fund product cycles.

Flexport Capital is seeing surging demand, and the four-year collaboration with BlackRock enables them to meet this growing demand. It’ll allow financing across various points of companies’ supply chains — through purchase orders, inventory pickup, freight movement, warehousing and final delivery.

Chinese Online Retailers Shift Global Marketing Gears as Tariffs, Costs Climb (link). This article examines how Chinese e-commerce giants like Shein and Temu are dramatically shifting their global marketing strategies in response to rising import tariffs and increased customer acquisition costs. Previously successful through low-cost manufacturing and aggressive ad spending focused on undercutting competitors on price, these companies are now pivoting toward efficiency, user retention, and precision targeting as their primary competitive weapons.

The most significant change has been a geographic reallocation of marketing budgets away from the United States following tariff policy changes, with user acquisition spending in the US dropping 32% to $1.1 billion while surging over seven times in France, Germany, and the UK.

Chinese platforms have also shifted toward remarketing strategies, spending $16.4 billion on re-engaging existing users—about 2.5 times their user acquisition budgets. This represents what some are calling "China E-Commerce 2.0," where success will depend less on selling the cheapest products and more on sophisticated data analytics, AI-driven optimization, and navigating complex regulatory environments across different markets. The companies face new challenges including ad fraud risks approaching $1 billion globally and increasing privacy restrictions, making technological sophistication rather than pure price competition the key differentiator going forward.

Last week Shopify announced the expansion of their shipping capabilities as an end-to-end fulfillment solution, built directly into the Shopify admin. While Shopify Shipping has been around for a decade - that is, the ability to gain access to discounted shipping rates from FedEx, UPS, DHL and USPS - Shopify has been pressing on new fulfillment initiatives via their Shopify Fulfillment Network. They partner with folks like Amazon MCF, DHL Fulfillment network, GoBolt, Mayple, Stord, Shipbob, Shipmonk and others.

Very intriguing to see Shopify slowly push deeper back into the world of fulfillment. I am eager to talk to merchants who use the new SFN network to better understand how this hybrid 4PL/3PL relationship works from both an operational and technical perspective.

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

- Matt

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