Well, I’m disappointed to announce that we were hit with our first new tariff bill yesterday on a shipment of Backup Batteries from China. 
Unfortunately, we have no choice but to raise prices to account for this new cost. The retail price of our highly-rated 7800mAh lithium-ion backup battery (and power bank) is now USD $49.
As all of you probably know by now, President Trump has been vocal about instituting new tariffs on all sorts of goods from select countries, including China, Canada and Mexico. For a little while it seemed like the tariffs were only threats, but call it bad timing or whatever, but the U.S. Customs and Border Protection put new 20% tariffs on goods from China and Hong Kong into effect on March 4. Our latest shipment of backup batteries cleared customs on March 7th. 
My goal is to remain politically neutral here, so I’m not going to elaborate on my personal feelings about our president’s economic policy, but I do owe it to you all to be transparent about our pricing and costs. I also think it’s important that Americans (and non-Americans alike) understand how tariffs work, because I’ve heard and seen a lot of confusion and misinformation here.
Our Backup Battery product is manufactured by Shenzhen SmartKey Power Co, a producer of UPS devices and power banks in Guangdong, China. China is the largest supplier of lithium battery products to the United States (and probably the world).
Here’s how it works – We order a pallet sized load of backup batteries at a time, and they’re shipped to us via ocean freight from China to Florida. We typically pay the supplier in China a 30% up-front deposit to begin production, which takes 30~45 days. Once production is complete, we pay the supplier the remaining 70% and the pallet is released to our freight forwarder, who picks it up from Guangdong, transports it through Hong Kong and onto a container ship bound for the United States. In this instance, the container ship left HK in January and arrived at the port of New York last week.
At this point, the product is unloaded and customs clearance begins. Our freight forwarder takes care of the customs clearance process. All products are assigned a “HTS” code which represents the category (and sometimes origin) of the product and it’s associated tariff/duty rate. In this case, our latest shipment was assigned a 7.5% tariff from the 2018 China tariffs instituted during President Trump’s first term (that have remained in place since then), plus a 20% tariff from the March 4, 2025 executive order, plus a 3.4% duty for the product category (lithium-ion battery). That’s a total of 30.9% in additional charges collected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The CBP invoices our freight forwarder and customs clearance agent, who then bill us for the tariffs. Yes, that’s right, Konnected pays the U.S. government this outrageous 30.9% surcharge, based on the declared value of the goods imported. No, China does not pay. They got paid months ago when they finished producing the products.
All that said, it’s American small businesses like Konnected that are hurt the most by these tariffs. We are forced to raise our prices to cover the additional costs, which will undoubtably reduce the appeal and lower our sales volume. Since in this case it’s just our backup battery, not a core product, it’s not a devastating blow, but I am now quite worried about what’s to come when we import more microcontroller chips, terminal blocks, wires and accessories, etc from China.
Konnected will not raise prices across the board. But, if our costs on specific products or product raw materials increase, we will have some tough decisions to make.
Thanks for understanding.
