Why does Shopify charge Section 232 duty on your whole product value?

What changed on April 6, 2026

The field still works exactly as Shopify documents it. What changed is what US customs does with a figure below 100.

Proclamation 11021, signed April 2, 2026, states that for goods entered for consumption on or after April 6, 2026 the Section 232 duty on steel, aluminum and copper articles and their derivatives applies to the full customs value of the imported product, regardless of metal content. CBP's implementing guidance (CSMS #68253075) carries the same basis.

Two official sources point different ways here, and we are not picking one for you. The proclamation is the rule CBP collects on. Shopify's duties and import taxes page, read September 20, 2026, still describes the setting as a way to calculate duty based on the actual amount of steel or aluminum in your products, and still documents the 100% default — Shopify has not rewritten that page since the April change.

The consequence runs one way, which is what makes this decidable without resolving the disagreement. At 100% your checkout collects what the entry is dutiable for. Below 100% your checkout collects less, the entry is still dutiable on the full customs value, and the shortfall comes out of your margin rather than the buyer's payment.

Until Shopify updates its guidance, the default is the conservative setting, and a lower figure is a decision to absorb duty deliberately.

Why Shopify assumes your product is 100% steel or aluminum

The default is not something Shopify invented — it mirrors how US Customs and Border Protection tells importers to file. Its bulletin on derivative steel goods (CSMS #64384423, March 11, 2025) states that for new steel derivatives outside Chapter 73, where the value of the steel content is the same as the entered value or is unknown, the duty must be reported based on the entire entered value. The matching aluminum bulletin (CSMS #65236645, June 3, 2025) sets out the same mechanism.

Both bulletins describe the regime that ran before April 6, 2026, when the metal share could still lower the value the duty was assessed on.

So the figure stands in for information the declaration never carried. Shopify says shipments into the United States that contain steel or aluminum are subject to Section 232 tariffs, and that the United States applies the additional tariff across all HTSUS codes that represent products that may contain steel and aluminum.

There is a threshold, and it is a weight test, not a value one. CBP's guidance says goods in the proclamation's annexes, except those classifiable in HTSUS Chapters 72, 73, 74 and 76, that contain less than 15 percent of the aggregate weight of the applicable metals are not subject to the duties it imposes. Not every US import rule ends in a bill: under the forced-labor presumption CBP holds the goods instead of pricing them.

Where to change the Section 232 percentage

The control sits in your own admin. Go to Settings → Taxes and duties → Manage, and enter the figure in the field named United States Section 232 percentage. Shopify describes what belongs there as the percentage of your product that is made of steel or aluminum.

The field belongs to the duties and import taxes feature, so it is there for stores that have that calculation switched on. What you enter is a statement about your product, not about one shipment.

Shopify attaches a second step to the change: to also receive a reduced rate when shipping your orders, Shopify's changelog says to update your commercial invoices to reflect the proportion of metal in your product. The admin figure governs what your checkout charges. That step dates from October 2025; since April 6, 2026 the proportion of metal on the invoice no longer lowers the value the duty is assessed on.

One percentage for the whole store, and only for the US

This is the part that changes the decision, not just the arithmetic. The percentage you select applies to all products in your store that are subject to Section 232, and Shopify states that you cannot set different percentages for individual products. There is one number, and it belongs to the store.

For a catalog built from one material, that costs nothing. For a mixed one it is a judgement to make deliberately: a single figure has to stand both for a metal-heavy line and for items that barely contain metal, and whichever way you set it, it misdescribes one of them. Which number is right for your store is a question about your own product specifications — not one this setting answers for you. The same question gets sharper still when the metal itself is not steel or aluminum — see which metals this field is actually documented for.

The second boundary is geographic. Shopify says the percentage applies to the calculation of duties and import taxes only for shipments to locations in the United States, and that it does not apply to any other destination. A store shipping into the EU or the UK is not touching those orders when it edits this field — those destinations run on their own duty regime, which we cover in our guide to EU landed cost.

When this setting arrived and what it leaves open

What the documentation does not settle is what a change does to orders you already have. No Shopify page we have found says whether a percentage change reaches orders already placed — as of September 2026 that is read off the duties and import taxes manual page, the charging international duties and charging duties pages, the understanding tariffs page and the October 2025 changelog post, none of which address it.

The customization is recent. Shopify announced it in a changelog post dated October 29, 2025, framing it as new support for customizing the percentages of your product's value that Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs apply to. The 100% assumption is what the calculation did before it.

The same question has a documented answer for a different feature: our note on return rule changes and orders already placed sets out what Shopify publishes there. Nothing in it carries across to a duty calculation, and none of the Section 232 pages above addresses the question, so certainty about orders already in flight has to come from Shopify support rather than from this field.