I had a supplier tell me that the shipments are being held in China until the tariff situation is resolved.

Can this be circumvented if it got sent to Australia first and from there to the States? Obviously, there is an additional cost. Or is Australia going to get hammered with 145% tariffs?

Manufactured or assembled in China = 145% doesn't matter pass through where))

Could be interpreted as smuggling or customs fraud.

On the customs form, you're supposed to specify "country of origin". Tariffs are based on where the item was created, not just where it went in the mail box. Things get more complicated when they are built with parts from various countries.

There’s lots of loopholes. The federal govnerment has some to allow the government to buy things like Lenovo computers.

Yes, but it's essentially fraud. The common term is "Origin washing." You have to declare the origin of the shipment, and the exception is that it goes through "substantial transformation."

If you were to buy a bunch of components from China, have them shipped to Australia and assembled there, then shipped to the US, you would pay the tariff applied to Australia, not China. Of course, you probably are paying some sort of import tax when the components make their way into Australia too.

Last I read, shipments from Hong Kong are being blocked by the HK government and DHL is refusing to ship

AliExpress doesn't really ship much. Most of the sellers just post their goods themselves. So I expect it will highly depend on the actual vendor. AliExpress is just a marketplace.

I ordered $400 worth of items last month only for 70% of it to be cancelled automatically because "the seller has not shipped in the required time."

My guess is some of the vendors decided to just stop shipping overseas but they can't update the seller pages fast enough to reflect this.

Based on some Youtube channels I watch, sellers are still shipping overseas to everywhere else.

I got that message for something last year.

Certainly seems more likely now.

Possibly related, but I've found recent Ali shipping to Canada has gotten much faster. I've received some thing in around a week that would normally take over a month.

Same to Australia. Things used to take 2-4 weeks to get here, now they're arriving within the week. More items seem to have the free postage option too.

I've noticed many 404 pages for things I was looking for on it in just the last week or so. Some things can't be found anywhere else either.

I squeaked a bunch of Choice (seems to be Ali's managed logistics) products in under the wire. Ten bags of stuff, some arriving just a few days before the de minimis tax exemption went away. All basically meeting or exceeding their delivery estimates - shipping time was about 6-8 days on average. Out of curiosity, I checked on a bunch of those listings a week later. Most were just 2-3x more expensive and said tariffs included. But one or two were unavailable to ship to the US as you saw.

The one item I ordered that wasn't Choice but also not expensive enough to justify Fedex seems to have been shipped but got lost. The tracking stalled long enough that I got an automatically-approved refund. Glad I didn't have to play the blame game for a found item trying to clear customs after the exemption went away.

I'm not planning on ordering anything else at the moment. But I imagine the longer the high tariff taxes stay in place, the more appealing Aliexpress (and specifically Choice) will become. The selection on Amazon and other US warehouses is going to dwindle as sellers avoid fronting the cost of paying high taxes to import items just to sit around, while taking the risk that the Mad King might have a different whim next week. Whereas direct from China purchases can pay the tariffs with cash in hand.

Aliexpress still ships to the US. Stuff that I buy (phone case, esp32, maker parts) is much more expensive now because of the Trump Administration tariffs.