Section 321 ended on 29 August 2025. Every parcel you send from Canada into the United States now needs full customs paperwork, whatever it cost. Vertex runs cross-border ecommerce shipping out of warehouses on both sides of the border, 4 Canadian cities and 22 US ones, so your inventory can sit wherever the duty math is cheapest. One inventory pool. One operations team.
Both directions, one desk
Most brands arrive shipping one direction and need the other inside a year. Both run on one inventory pool, one operations team, and the same customs documentation. Cross-border ecommerce shipping behaves differently in each direction, though, and the difference shows up in your landed cost rather than your carrier invoice.
Shipping to Canada from a US warehouse hits two walls: transit times on cross-border parcels, and duty collected at the customer’s door. Our Canadian fulfillment centres hold your stock inside Canada, so Canadian orders ship domestically, with Canada Post or Purolator on the final mile. Duty gets paid once, on the pallet. Not on every parcel your customer opens.
Canadian brands used to ship US orders under Section 321 and pay nothing. That lane closed. The choice now is a US inventory node or per-parcel entry with a broker filing on every shipment. We compare both against your order volume, with duty figures from your customs broker, before you commit. The cutover takes five days.
What cross-border covers
Six workflows sit on top of our ecommerce fulfillment, on one desk, with one operations lead who knows your account by name. Everything below runs through the same warehouse system and the same panel of partner customs brokers, so no part of your shipment gets handed to a second vendor halfway across the border.
Bulk shipping moves inventory between our US and Canadian warehouses on a truck rather than in a thousand envelopes. Customs sees one consolidated shipment, one commercial invoice, one entry. The freight side runs through our freight management desk on TL or LTL. That single customs event is the largest cost fix still available after Section 321.
Some goods are better off crossing one order at a time. Cross-border parcel shipping suits CUSMA-qualified SKUs, which clear duty-free, and brands under roughly 200 US orders a month. We pass the order and product data to your broker on every DTC order, and the broker prepares and certifies the customs entry. Carrier selection runs a live rate-shop across UPS, FedEx and USPS on each label.
You can also ship Delivered Duty Paid, or DDP. Duty is collected at checkout, so your customer meets no surprise fees at the door.
CUSMA is the Canada-US-Mexico trade agreement. It decides whether a product crosses the border free or pays. Your customs broker certifies each SKU against the rules-of-origin tests: tariff shift, regional value content, or wholly obtained. We record that verdict, and the country of origin behind it, in the warehouse system at receipt.
A SKU without an origin tag is a SKU we cannot route. That is why tagging happens at receipt, not at pick.
Paperwork is where cross-border shipments stall. We supply the shipment and product data your licensed customs broker uses to prepare commercial invoices, certificates of origin, ACI eManifest filings for trucks entering Canada under CBSA rules, ACE manifest filings for trucks entering the US, B3 entry forms and Form 7501 entries.
A licensed customs broker files the entry. We coordinate the shipment handoff with them, and brokerage fees pass through at cost. If you import as a non-resident importer, CARM registration and the importer-of-record role stay with you.
Inventory placement is the lever most brands pull last and should pull first. We map your orders by country, by CUSMA status and by retail compliance window, then split stock across the US-Canada footprint. Fewer border crossings, shorter delivery times, lower per-order costs. Sometimes the answer is one node. Not two.
We record the duty your customs broker assesses on each shipment and lane, and report it alongside freight and fulfillment costs so your finance team can see landed cost and price accurately.
A significant share of North American-sourced goods may qualify for preferential CUSMA treatment where they meet the agreement’s product-specific rules of origin, including applicable regional value-content requirements.
Send us your lanes and your volumes. We answer inside one business day. No mailing list, no drip sequence, no sales rep assigned to you.
The 2026 policy reset
For years, Canadian 3PL providers sold one pitch: ship to your American customers from Canada under Section 321 and skip US warehousing entirely. Customs and Border Protection suspended the provision on 29 August 2025, for every country and every commercial parcel. That pitch is dead.
Section 321 was the rule that let parcels under $800 enter the United States duty-free with minimal paperwork. It applied to Canada like everywhere else. Since 29 August 2025, every commercial parcel needs full customs documentation and duty payment, whatever the declared value. De minimis treatment is gone, not reduced.
Every SKU now falls into one of two buckets. Goods that pass the USMCA rules of origin tests cross free. Goods that fail pay the applicable US rate. A $20 hat with imported fabric carries duties and taxes before it leaves the building, while its qualified sibling clears at zero. Same brand, same shelf, different math.
The two structural fixes
Two structures work after Section 321. We run both. Which one fits depends on your monthly US order volume and how much of your catalogue qualifies under CUSMA rules of origin. We will say so if the cheaper structure is the right one for you.
Right for brands shipping 200 or more US orders a month.
Local fulfillment inside the destination country is what makes those numbers work.
Right for brands under 200 US orders a month, or catalogues where most SKUs qualify.
Your broker certifies origin per SKU, we tag it at receipt, qualified parcels clear duty-free and the rest pay their rate accurately. One inventory node, no duplicate storage, customs brokerage filed per parcel. The trade-off is per-order costs that climb as volume climbs.
Talk to a team that coordinates cross-border shipments with customs brokers every day. We’ll review your lanes, SKU mix, volumes and your broker’s CUSMA determinations, then recommend the fulfillment structure that keeps costs lowest.
Cross-border pricing
Freight rates and broker fees pass through at cost. CUSMA tagging, customs documentation coordination and duty tracking are included in your operations fee. We do not bill them as extras. Our published pick and pack pricing starts at $1.05 per DTC order. Cross-border work is quoted on top.
| Service | Indicative pricing | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Cross-border bulk transfer (TL or LTL) | by lane | Pass-through freight rate + partner brokerage fee |
| CUSMA SKU tagging at receipt | included | WMS tag against your broker certification |
| Customs documentation coordination | pass-through | Partner customs broker fees pass through |
| Cross-border parcel routing | rate-shop | Multi-carrier parcel rate-shop on every cross-border order |
| Non-CUSMA duty tracking | included | Per-SKU duty cost lands on CFO report |
| Bill 96 French-labelled SKU routing (Quebec) | included | Quebec-destined orders ship from Montreal node against French SKUs |
We have modelled the 22 busiest lanes between our nodes. Here is what you pay:
Transit times for each lane are published before you sign anything.
What we do not do
We coordinate cross-border logistics; we are not a customs broker, an FTZ operator, or a hazmat 3PL. The honest answer is to refer those layers to specialists rather than pretend to fill the gap.
We are not a licensed customs broker. CUSMA origin certification, B3 entry filing, ACI/eManifest entry, and ACE entry filing all run through licensed customs brokers (Livingston, Cole, Deringer, CH Robinson Customs) coordinated through our desk. The brokerage cost passes through.
We coordinate with FTZ-licensed operators in 17 US metros and CBSA sufferance warehouse specialists in all 4 Canadian cities, but we do not hold the FTZ or sufferance license ourselves. Duty-deferred holding routes through the licensed operator.
Hazmat cross-border requires DOT certification on the US side and Transport Canada certification on the Canadian side, plus specialized facility infrastructure neither we nor our partner brokers run for hazmat. Aerosols, batteries above 100Wh, flammables, and corrosives all need a hazmat-certified cross-border 3PL.
Cross-border lane calculator
What does cross-border 3PL cost on your lanes?
Pick a Canadian origin + US destination (or US origin + Canadian destination) to see the tariff treatment, sample CUSMA math on a $20 SKU, carrier mix, and the biggest gotcha on that lane. We modelled the 22 most-trafficked cross-border lanes in the panel below.
Pick a cross-border lane
Choose a Canadian origin + US destination (or US origin + Canadian destination) to see the 2026 math.
Onboarding
Onboarding runs 2 to 6 weeks depending on catalogue size and integration count. The first parcel ships five days after signature. No annual contract, month-to-month with 60 days’ written notice, and no setup, software or per-seat fees.
We map your SKUs, collect HS code data, the Harmonized System codes customs uses for product classification, from you or your broker, and set CUSMA tags with your broker.
Integrations go live and test orders run end to end.
A named operations lead owns your account and publishes weekly accuracy numbers. Every order in the first 30 days gets a second-pass check.
Get a cross-border 3PL quote in 24 hours. We simplify post-Section-321 fulfillment with SKU-level CUSMA tagging, customs broker coordination, and operations across Canada and the US, helping you reduce friction, control duty costs, and deliver faster with one inventory pool, one WMS, and one team.
Our FAQs
The de minimis suspension ended the $800 duty-free allowance on commercial parcels entering the United States. It costs you the applicable duty rate on every non-qualifying SKU, plus brokerage on each entry. CUSMA-qualified goods still cross at zero. The fix is structural rather than clerical.
Yes. Shopify 3PL fulfillment runs on direct app integration, with orders in our system in about 90 seconds. Amazon 3PL fulfillment covers FBA prep and MFN from the same floor, including stock sent across the border into a US fulfillment center. BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Walmart, WFS and TikTok Shop connect too.
