>This will benefit the likes of Amazon more than anyone else.

A _huge_ chunk of Amazon is low effort Chinese clone / drop shipped crap or straight up forgery. I don't feel sorry for /r/entrepreneur denizens' loss.

It will help the kind of small business with core competencies revolving around producing things and hurt the kind of small business with core competencies revolving around buying things on Alibaba and selling them on Amazon.

People who actually wanted to do things well often couldn't even afford to ship their product for the entire price of product + shipping for lots of dropshipped things under the old ways. I'm happy that the class of business that monetizes outdated shipping policy are going away.

> People who actually wanted to do things well...

You think intermediaries (e.g. dropshippers) can't add value to a supply chain? I don't know why you'd be so uncaring about /r/entrepreneurs when these are generally just people trying to get by as best they can. Having said that, this treaty withdrawal is still a good idea.

  You think intermediaries (e.g. dropshippers)
  can't add value to a supply chain?

These days, don't Chinese companies mostly list the products on Ebay and Amazon themselves? Just today I ordered something on Ebay and got a paypal receipt for my payment to 覃尚田.

I don't see what value an extra intermediary adds in that situation?

Dropshippers add range and access to market segments the manufacturer, or wholesellers, cannot ofer. These dropshippers are able to go after small customers with low order volumes. So they indirectly add value by increasing revenue.

they also cut out other middlemen like wholesellers and brick-and-mortar retailers. Done well, and at scale, this could be one of the more serious thrats for Amazon in the future.

> These days, don't Chinese companies mostly list the products on Ebay and Amazon themselves?

Yes, it's pretty standard to find the same company with store-fronts on AliExpress, Ebay and Amazon. It's sometimes worth checking for differences in prices though due to lag in updating each catalogue.

Faster shipping, added support, ease of returns. I am sure there are many other ways those "useless middlemen" could also add value.

Absolutely intermediaries in supply chains can add value.

can being the operative word. Amazon, New Egg, WalMart et al. opening themselves up to a certain sort of very low effort intermediaries sucks quality out of their platforms and makes online shopping a minefield of avoiding knockoffs (sometimes with Amazon impossible, to the extent where there are certain things you just shouldn't buy) and fake or paid-for reviews.

Fixing artificially low shipping won't kill this sort of behavior but it will make it easier and more profitable to compete against.

If they provide some level of stocking and quality control, they can. Dropshippers arbitrating between amazon and aliexpress don't really provide much of that.

What about insurance brokers? Or travel brokers? They don't have stock. Intermediaries (sort of) inherently create quality control via having a better perspective on the market than any single supplier can, and through pressuring individual suppliers via their own large-scale buying/selling activities.

E.g. if a dropshipper is selling mobile phone covers at scale, and stops using supplier x because the poor quality is affecting the dropshipper's brand, this puts more pressure on the supplier than if individual end-users stopped buying their products. Same applies to all brokers. They glean great power over suppliers in this fashion, while improving the experience for end-users (prime example: Amazon).

That isn't what happens though. Quality control with foreign suppliers is very difficult. A bad supplier with a bad name will disappear and come back with a new name. The shops are small and there are an enormous amount of them so there is very little what you might call reputation capital. Find people with experience sourcing products in China and get them to tell you stories.

Nobody forbids /r/entrepreneur denizens to go to China and open his own dropship outfit there. And in fact, many of them did. You will be surprised that all those aliexpress stores that have product description in perfect Russian, German, and French are shops ran by Russian citizens in China, mostly elderly women.

Which isn’t a bad thing. Maybe we’ll see less spam drop shipped items on Amazon finally. eBay too.

The things you see on Amazon are bought by the container-load from China and sent to Amazon's warehouses for fulfilment. This change will encourage that sort of business because it'll no longer be worthwhile sending direct from China (as the likes of dx.com and aliexpress do now).

While Amazon won't tell us, I think you are incorrect. A huge fraction of the cheap clone items you see listed are not in Amazon warehouses but are shipped direct from China. Fully half of my Amazon purchases over the past year have been direct shipped from China, to the point where now I check Alibaba first before purchasing something from Amazon if the item is unimportant enough that I don't care about the risk of getting a cheap counterfeit.

AliExpress is doing that too. I'm in Spain, and I literally just received an SMS for a shipment from "SINOTRANS" which is what AliExpress uses to ship in bulk from China then fulfill locally.

Aliexpress is the consumer-facing side of Alibaba, which is the 5th largest internet company by revenue. The fact they're doing this isn't at all surprising.

I was more referencing the non amazon distributed items, ones shipped and sold by third party.

I'm low income for where I live and buy a lot of basic $1-$5 clothes from China that would be $20-$30 equivalent in USA. This is going to hurt me directly. It's not like I'm buying food, housing, electricity from China, but having good quality fashionable clothes for very cheap when I can't afford anything except Goodwill here is beneficial for professionalism at my job, and overall satisfaction about myself.

Trump should focus on putting more money in our pockets rather than making things more expensive and hoping the pipe dream of any manufacturing is coming back to US is a reality.

Please don't take offense, but these subsidies are paid for by our taxes and I have no interest in paying to help you dress nice.

Also, if you're really buying clothes from China for $1-$5 you're almost certainly supporting child labor.

Subsidies? No, it's called free trade and efficient shipping. If I'm buying clothes anywhere else and it says made in China (most), I'm probably supporting child labor. I'm skipping the retailer charging $12 for the same thing I get for $1.88. What kind of country do I live in where I'm not allowed to dress cheap but well to go to work? What the absolute f*?

I walk to work, so I don't want to subsidize your commute or travel by roads, and I don't fly often so I'd rather not subsidize the FAA as well.

That 90% discount is because your/our tax dollars make it cheaper for China to ship here than for a business like the one you work at or might get a job at or even start in the future to ship to China or other countries.

I agree that we shouldn't pretend that we can make everything domestically--but we also cannot allow our economy and basic goods--by virtue of subsidies, no less--to atrophy while we become dependent on the parasitic influence of the PRC. China is not a free country, they are a aggressive totalitarian regime and it is a shame that the US will soon be 100% dependent on them for every good we buy.

Shop around, you can find much cheaper clothes than you quoted in the US.