No More Cheap Shipping for Chinese Sellers
I&#x27;m wondering how this is going to effect the hobbyist and small business electronics markets here in the United States?<p>Know how cheap and easy it is to get a small number PCBs made in China and shipped to the US? That&#x27;s over.<p>So is any number of small electronic parts that would&#x27;ve been shipped free or cheaply from China. Cheap ESP8266 boards? Nope. Cheap automotive relays? Nope. Basically any and every kind of piece of electronics components, modules, etc you can think of will jump in price drastically.<p>Even if it doesn&#x27;t need to - it will (like I&#x27;ve seen on the tariffs, prices jumped for small amounts of electronic components just because, even if they were being shipped directly to the end-user consumer - when that&#x27;s not a part of the tariffs - direct to consumer sales shouldn&#x27;t be affected, but because the vendors could do it, they did it anyhow - just to make some extra cash).<p>So where are hobbyists and others supposed to get these parts now?<p>Digikey and Mouser for some of it. Surplus for others. But for boards and modules and such - well, there&#x27;s just Sparkfun and Adafruit - maybe a couple of others (not sure?).<p>But they are likely to raise their prices too, because they depend on the components (resistors, diodes, mosfets, chips, aka the &quot;raw materials&quot;) to make their boards (Sparkfun makes them in-house - or at least some of them - but I don&#x27;t know what Adafruit does).<p>Or we&#x27;ll have to pay the extra shipping fees and other costs (because the chinese sellers will just add on some extra cost - just to grab it - it&#x27;s inevitable).<p>This will have a ripple effect; small entrepreneurs and startups - kickstarter startups especially - won&#x27;t be able to compete, unless they base themselves in Shenzhen - because where are they going to get the components cheaper than a competitor who is already there? They aren&#x27;t made in America any longer (and they never will be again - get that fantasy out of your head if you think that&#x27;s going to happen).<p>Radio Row is gone. The original &quot;silicon valley&quot; is gone. Heck, there used to be a ton of computer (mini) manufacturers and businesses here in Phoenix - they are virtually gone, too.<p>And now with this change - however you feel about it - is going to hobble the next up-and-comers, and current suppliers. At least, that&#x27;s how I am seeing it.<p>Now I&#x27;ll admit - it wasn&#x27;t fair for competition here - but it wasn&#x27;t as if China was doing something wrong, as far as I understand it. They were playing by the rules set forth by an international body. Maybe it wasn&#x27;t fair to us. But instead of letting this kind of thing go on for 1-2 decades, it should have been fixed back then. Now it is likely to destroy or severely change at least one or more areas of enthusiast and hobbyist things (think also RC, drones, etc), as well as probably a ton of other non-electronic things. Do we really think there are that many suppliers here in the US that will charge low prices (competitive with Chinese suppliers) and have fair shipping rates to boot?<p>The fact is, it will likely still be cheaper to ship it from China, even with the extra cost on shipping - since you&#x27;re going to be paying that anyhow. For instance - my goto - 12V DC gearmotors. I can buy one kind from a supplier of Ametek (maybe Mouser or Digikey); I will pay whatever the high cost of shipping such an item to my door in addition to the price. Have you ever priced those motors in small quantities?<p>When you can get them...I&#x27;ve seen prices 10-20x over the equivalent motor from a supplier in China. What would cost $15.00 in China for a single motor, can be up to $100.00 or more from a US manufacturer for the same specs. Let&#x27;s say it cost $10.00 to ship to my door, whether from China or the US, and let&#x27;s say the Chinese supplier adds on an extra $5.00 &quot;just because fee&quot; - well, which is cheaper? $110.00 dollars for the US motor, or $30.00 for the Chinese motor?<p>It&#x27;s all a farce in my opinion - this administration essentially raising prices, which is going to be passed on to the consumer ultimately, trying to gain support from US small businesses (that&#x27;s the political angle), at the expense of the rest of consumers, and is selling it with some kind of idea or expectation that this is somehow going to lead to the United States becoming a large scale manufacturer of &quot;everything&quot; that we get from China now. Of course what isn&#x27;t said is that, even if that fantasy somehow did become true - those items manufactured here would still cost a hell of a lot more to make, and they would be virtually unsaleable on the international market because of that (let&#x27;s ignore the fact that we&#x27;ll be lucky if other countries ever buy from us again).<p>I see a very, very bleak future ahead for this country - no matter what happens with this current administration or the next. Maybe that was always going to be the case. The problem is, prior to this admin, that date was likely out a few decades - now those decades have been erased, and that future is happening now (and it is worse than it would have been had it happened &quot;naturally&quot; I think).<p>I say if you are an American and are under 30 years of age, and you have any marketable skills at all, you might want to think long and hard about emigrating. Dead serious on this.