Late last week, Sydonie Baldissera started hearing "whispers" that Australia Post was about to halt all deliveries to the US.
A small business owner from Adelaide, she'd suspected something like that might happen soon.
A number of import rules and tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump are set to change later this week, including the suspension of the De Minimis exemption for inbound goods below $US800 ($1233) and requiring the pre-payment of tariffs before an item's arrival in the US.
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And the timing couldn't have been worse for Baldissera.
She'd just restocked a popular collection from her stationery and accessories brand The Quirky Cup Collective and US orders were flooding in.
Watching them stack up, she knew she only had two options.
"We could either ship out orders immediately, or cancel and refund all the US orders to avoid tariffs or shipping headaches," she told 9news.com.au.
"Usually we'd offer to hold customer parcels or issue store credits, but that would have been a nightmare to navigate as those orders would have been subject to tariffs if sent at a later date."
So Baldissera and several of her staff gave up a huge chunk of their weekend to package and ship every single US order by Monday morning.
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As soon as those orders were posted, Baldissera suspended shipping to the US on The Quirky Cup Collective website.
Less than 24 hours later, Australia Post announced it was suspending deliveries to the United States and Puerto Rico until further notice.
Baldissera hopes to reopen shipping to her US customers in the near future but has to find a way around the costly new US tariffs first.
Current advice indicates that sellers, including Australian small businesses like Baldissera's, will have to foot the bill for US import tariffs.
But that's a cost she can't afford to take on right now.
"I'm currently doing what I can to figure out our next steps," she said.
"The goal is turn shipping to the US back on so our US customers have the option to buy, but it's just setting up the backend to facilitate the changes and either waiting for Australia Post to turn [shipping to] the US back on, or looking into another carrier."
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The Quirky Cup Collective is already feeling the sting of losing its US customers.
Since turning off US shipping, Baldissera has noticed a "definite decrease" in daily sales.
It's hard to say how much this move will affect her business long-term but she confessed it has been a scary situation for many small businesses to navigate.
Especially those that aren't as established as The Quirky Cup Collective.
"I think it would have had a huge effect in my first year of business," Baldissera said.
"I don't know if it would have shut me down, but it would have definitely made things incredibly difficult and uncertain."
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