ePacket Shipping Method Complete Guide

Read this first: if you last looked at ePacket a few years ago, the most important thing about it has changed. The service still runs, but the tax treatment that made it cheap is gone. The United States suspended duty-free de minimis treatment for shipments from China and Hong Kong on 2 May 2025, then extended that suspension to every country on 29 August 2025. Low-value parcels that used to enter the US duty-free now attract duty.

This guide explains what ePacket is, what it still does well, and — honestly — what it no longer does.

What ePacket is

ePacket is a delivery service for lightweight, low-value parcels sent from China and Hong Kong. It launched in 2011, when USPS partnered with Hongkong Post to give Chinese sellers a faster route into the US market than the old China EMS surface option, which could take well over a month and often arrived without tracking.

The mechanics are simple: the parcel travels by air from China or Hong Kong, then enters the destination country’s own postal stream for final delivery. In the US that means USPS handles the last mile. Crucially, tracking runs end to end at no extra charge, which is what set ePacket apart from the cheap options that preceded it.

Current limits and eligibility

The parcel restrictions have been stable for years:

• Weight — under 4.4 lbs (2 kg)
• Declared value — no more than $400
• Size — maximum 24 inches (61 cm) in length, with combined length, height and thickness under 36 inches (91 cm)
• Origin — China or Hong Kong only

Destination coverage has grown a great deal. Where ePacket once reached about 30 countries, it now covers roughly 92, including the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Japan and most of Europe. If you read an older guide with a 30-country list, that list is long out of date — check with your supplier or forwarder for the current destination in question rather than relying on any published list, including this one.

The change that matters: de minimis has ended

For most of ePacket’s life, its real advantage was not just the postal rate. It was that parcels under the US de minimis threshold — $800 since 2016 — entered the country duty-free and without a formal customs entry. Combine a subsidised postal rate with zero duty and no brokerage, and you get the economics that made China-to-US dropshipping viable.

That is over. The sequence:

• 2 May 2025 — duty-free de minimis suspended for goods from China and Hong Kong
• 30 July 2025 — Executive Order 14324 signed, extending the suspension to all countries
• 29 August 2025 — the all-country suspension takes effect
• 24 June 2026 — US Customs and Border Protection makes the suspension indefinite by regulation, with separate rules for postal and non-postal shipments, and a new postal informal entry process

A statutory repeal of de minimis for commercial shipments is scheduled to follow in July 2027. The practical reading: this is not a temporary measure to wait out.

What that means for a parcel today

Shipments arriving through the international postal network are handled differently from courier and freight shipments. For postal items, duty is assessed on an ad valorem basis — a percentage of each package’s value, using the effective tariff rate for the goods’ country of origin.

Two consequences follow, and both bite hardest at exactly the price point ePacket was built for:

Duty is now a real line item on cheap goods. A $22 parcel that used to land duty-free now carries a duty charge. On a low-margin product, that can be the whole margin.

Somebody has to handle the entry. Every commercial parcel now needs a customs entry. Whether the seller prepays, the carrier bills you, or your customer gets a demand at the door, that cost and that friction now exist where they previously did not. The last of those is the worst outcome for a retailer: a surprise bill on delivery is one of the most reliable ways to generate a refund request and a bad review.

Delivery times

Transit itself has actually improved since ePacket’s early years. Typical delivery to the US now runs about 7 to 15 working days from dispatch, and up to around 15 business days for other destinations — better than the 20-to-30-day windows quoted in older guides.

Treat those as averages, not promises. Customs processing is the variable now, and with every parcel requiring an entry, clearance is a bigger share of total transit time than it used to be.

Tracking

End-to-end tracking is still included. While the parcel is in China or Hong Kong, track through China Post or Hongkong Post; once it enters the destination country, the local postal operator takes over — USPS in the US, Australia Post in Australia, and so on.

Aggregators such as AfterShip and 17TRACK will follow a parcel across both legs, which saves switching between postal sites. Your supplier provides the tracking code; on AliExpress it appears under Orders alongside the shipping method.

Does ePacket still make sense?

For some things, yes. It remains a cheap, tracked air service for genuinely small and light parcels, and 92 destination countries is real coverage. If you are sending samples, spare parts or small accessories from a Chinese supplier, it still does that job well.

What it no longer supports is the business model built on top of it. Single-unit, low-margin dropshipping from China to US consumers depended on duty-free entry, and duty-free entry is gone. If your unit economics were written before 2025, they need rebuilding with duty and entry costs in them.

The alternatives worth pricing:

• Bulk import, then fulfil domestically. One customs entry across hundreds of units instead of one per unit. Duty per item is usually far lower, and your customers get domestic delivery speeds. This is the direction most sellers who survived the change have taken.
• Domestic or nearshore suppliers. Higher unit cost, no import duty, days rather than weeks in transit.
• Courier services with landed-cost quoting (DDP terms), so duty is calculated and paid up front rather than surprising your customer.

If you are importing in bulk

Once you move from parcels to pallets, you leave the postal system entirely and you are into freight terms — which is a different set of rules with different traps. Our guide to FOB shipping and Incoterms 2020 covers where risk and cost actually pass between you and your supplier, and why containerised cargo should usually ship FCA rather than FOB.

And once the stock has landed, selling it wholesale needs paperwork of its own — our free wholesale order form template and line sheet templates are a reasonable place to start.

Last word

ePacket is still a working service, and for small, light, tracked parcels from China it is still competitive. But the reason most people looked it up — cheap goods landing duty-free — no longer applies anywhere in the United States. Price your imports with duty in them, decide who pays it before your customer finds out at the door, and if you are shipping any real volume, look hard at consolidating into bulk shipments instead.

Accurate as of August 2026. Customs rules in this area have changed repeatedly since 2025 and are still moving — verify current duty treatment with CBP or a licensed customs broker before pricing anything. This is general information, not customs or legal advice.