A few weeks ago I wrote about brands that move production from China to Vietnam and find out they never really left, because the parts and the tooling still come from China. Consider this part two. The same brands tend to make a second version of that mistake at the other end of the business. They spread out where they make their product, then sell almost all of it into one country: the United States. (Cross-border sales are still under a fifth of all online commerce.)
The whole idea behind spreading production is that leaning on one country is a risk. That’s what “China plus one” is, building a second base alongside China so your whole supply doesn’t depend on one place. Investors have pushed brands toward this for years. But if it’s dangerous to depend on one country to make your product, it’s just as dangerous to depend on one country to buy it. When all of your customers sit in one market, all of your revenue rides on that market’s currency, its spending and its trade rules. If any one of those moves the wrong way, it works against everything you sell at once.
The rules for that one market won’t sit still
Look at what a U.S.-only brand has lived through in the last year. De minimis, the rule that let anything under $800 enter the country duty-free, was the backbone of cheap cross-border shipping for a decade. It ended for China and Hong Kong on May 2, 2025, then for everyone else on August 29, 2025. Congress had it slated to end in 2027. The timeline got pulled forward by more than a year and a half, so if your margins assumed duty-free entry, they broke with a few weeks of warning.
Tariffs moved just as hard. In February 2026 the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the law the administration had leaned on for its “reciprocal” tariffs, a 1977 statute called IEEPA, never gave a president the power to set tariffs at all. Those tariffs ended on February 24, 2026. The same day, the administration reimposed a 10% tariff on nearly every country using a different law. Now brands that had already paid the old tariffs are still waiting to hear whether they get that money back.
None of that was on anyone’s roadmap, and that’s the real problem with leaning on one market. A brand selling into a dozen countries takes a change like that on a slice of its revenue. A brand selling into one takes it on everything, with no second market to pick up the slack while the first sorts itself out.
The customers are already there
This isn’t only about playing defense. The market outside the U.S. is big and still growing fast. Cross-border e-commerce is on track to climb from about $550 billion in 2025 to roughly $2 trillion by 2034. And the brands already selling into it aren’t doing it out of optimism. In a 2025 survey of senior U.S. e-commerce leaders, 91% said international sales are a profitable revenue stream, and nearly half said foreign markets already drive more than 20% of their revenue.
Going global no longer takes a giant
Ten years ago this argument fell apart on the practical side. Selling abroad meant building most of a company a second time in every market. A local entity, local payment methods, local tax handling and a warehouse stocked with inventory before you had a single order to justify it. Doing it that way ran anywhere from around $150,000 for an easy lane like the U.S. into Canada to north of $1 million for a full move into Europe and the U.K., and the first year usually ran at a loss.
Most of that’s now avoidable, because brands have fulfillment options today that didn’t exist before. With direct fulfillment, for example, brands can skip regional warehousing altogether by holding all their stock in one place near the factory (i.e., a single warehouse in China) and shipping directly to customers anywhere, order by order. That removes the parts that used to make expansion expensive: the local entity, the inventory committed to a market before it’s proven and the carrier contracts signed country by country. What’s left is mostly ad spend. A brand turns on ads in a new market to test it. If it doesn’t respond, the ads go back off. The only loss is the spend, not a warehouse lease and a container of unsold stock.
With the cost of being wrong mostly gone, what’s left is the exposure itself. A brand that spreads its supply chain across three countries to avoid depending on one, then sells into a single market, hasn’t escaped the risk. It’s just moved it, from the factory to the checkout.
