Ask shoppers why they do not buy internationally. Then ask businesses why they do not sell internationally. You get almost the same list.

That should stop you. Supply and demand are not misaligned here. Both sides are stalled by the same handful of things, which means cross-border is not a demand problem or a capability problem. It is a friction problem, and friction can be designed out.

The mirrored list

Industry research puts the two sets of barriers side by side, and the overlap is nearly total.

Shoppers say they do not buy across borders because of high delivery costs or long delivery times (45 percent), fear of fraud or lack of trust (45 percent), customs, duties and taxes (41 percent), complicated or costly returns (36 percent), and uncertainty about the delivery provider (33 percent).

Businesses say they do not sell across borders because of high delivery costs or long delivery times (47 percent), customs, duties and taxes (43 percent), complicated returns (36 percent), uncertainty about which markets to enter (27 percent), and uncertainty about the delivery provider (25 percent).

Delivery cost and time sit at number one on both lists. Customs and duties land in the top three on both. Returns sit fourth for shoppers and third for businesses.

The buyer and the seller are standing on opposite sides of the same wall.

One of those barriers just changed permanently

For years, the duties problem had an escape hatch. Low-value parcels entered the United States duty free under the $800 de minimis threshold, and an enormous amount of cross-border e-commerce was engineered specifically to fit through that door.

The door is closed. The de minimis exemption was suspended for China and Hong Kong on May 2, 2025, and for all other countries on August 29, 2025. On June 24, 2026, Customs and Border Protection went further, publishing two interim final rules that indefinitely suspend the exemption across every mode of importation, postal and non-postal alike. Low-value shipments now require formal or informal entry, tariff classification, and payment of applicable duties, regardless of value or country of origin.

This is not executive policy that a future administration might quietly reverse. Congress wrote the ending into law. The statutory de minimis exemption terminates on July 1, 2027.

This is not only a United States story. The European Union has agreed to eliminate its 150 euro duty exemption, Thailand removed its low-value exemption in January 2026, and the United Kingdom is moving to end its own relief threshold. The direction of travel is the same everywhere.

For scale, CBP processed over a billion de minimis shipments in a single fiscal year before the change. That volume did not disappear. It simply became dutiable.

So the honest read is this. Most of the barriers on that list are fixable. The duty is not. It is now a permanent cost of doing cross-border business, and that is clarifying.

You cannot remove the duty. You can remove the surprise.

What kills a cross-border sale is not the existence of a duty. It is the discovery of one.

Independent research from the Baymard Institute finds that unexpected extra costs, shipping, taxes and fees, are the leading cause of checkout abandonment. A duty shown clearly at checkout is a price. The same duty presented at the door by a courier asking for payment is a betrayal, and it produces refused shipments, support tickets, chargebacks, and a customer who does not come back.

Delivered Duty Paid means the landed cost, duties and taxes included, is calculated and collected at checkout. The customer sees one number and pays nothing at the door. Delivered Duty Unpaid means the customer settles duties on arrival, usually with a broker they have no relationship with.

DDU is cheaper to operate and more expensive to survive. Now that nearly every parcel is dutiable, it turns a routine international order into a doorstep negotiation. DDP costs more to build, and it protects the sale.

None of this requires a particular carrier. It requires accurate classification, a real landed-cost calculation at checkout, and a duty process that does not depend on the customer’s goodwill at the door.

The number one barrier: cost and time

Delivery cost and time top both lists, and this is where the real trade-off lives.

Postal-hybrid moves your parcel through a commercial network and hands it to the destination country’s postal service for final delivery. It is the lower-cost path. It is slower, tracking is usually less granular, and the handoff between networks is where visibility tends to thin out.

Express moves through a single integrated network end to end. It is faster, clearance is more controlled, the data is richer, and it costs materially more.

Neither is the answer, because they serve different orders. A low-value, non-urgent order into a price-sensitive market does not need express economics. A high-value, time-sensitive order does not survive a postal handoff with thin tracking. Segment the order book by value, urgency, and destination expectation, then match the mode to the segment. Most shippers pick one mode and apply it to everything, which is how you overspend and under-serve at the same time.

As for the cost the shopper sees, free delivery is what they say would most unlock their cross-border buying, at 57 percent, ahead of secure payment and buyer protection at 48 percent, free returns at 43 percent, prices in local currency at 41 percent, and clear transit times at 37 percent. Free delivery is not free. It is a margin decision. Offer it where the order value supports it, use thresholds to lift basket size, and price it into the product where the market tolerates it.

Returns, the barrier nobody designs for

Returns rank in the top four for shoppers and the top three for businesses, and most cross-border programs still treat them as an exception rather than a designed path. That is expensive.

The workable options are all carrier-neutral. Aggregate returns in the destination market and bring them back consolidated rather than one parcel at a time. Set a value threshold below which a returnless refund costs less than the reverse freight. Publish the returns policy in plain language before the sale, because an unclear returns path is itself a reason not to buy.

The through-line

Look again at those lists. High costs, long times, fear of fraud, uncertainty about the provider, complicated returns.

None of those are distance problems. They are uncertainty problems.

The next phase of cross-border growth goes to the brands that make international delivery feel as ordinary as domestic. Ordinary means the price at checkout is the price, the date shown is the date met, and the return path is knowable before the customer buys.

The growth is real. It goes to whoever removes the doubt.

Takeaway: You cannot make the duty disappear. You can make it predictable, and predictable is what converts.

Which barrier is costing you the most right now: the duty handling, the mode mix, or the returns path? I would like to hear where people are actually stuck.