cross-border ecommerce

Brent Peterson sat down with Global-e North America Chief Executive Officer Matthew Merrilees for a conversation focused on practical methods for managing tariffs, building diversified supply chains, and protecting margins while selling direct-to-consumer across borders. Matthew walked through real-time examples, tactical decisions, and forward-looking considerations that every brand leader should review before the next pricing meeting. He also touched on software architecture, duty engines, and the fast-changing regulatory landscape, underscoring why speed and accuracy now differentiate winners from laggards in international commerce. From tariff shocks to multi-warehouse decisions, the episode delivered clear, actionable guidance without venturing into speculation. Listeners gained a blueprint for aligning finance, operations, and customer experience teams around a single cross-border strategy that scales.

Key Takeaways

1. Tariff exposure now ranks as the first concern for most North America–based brands entering or expanding in foreign markets.
2. Profitability goals must stand next to growth targets; otherwise, new channels create hidden losses that compound quarter over quarter.
3. A dynamic duty and tax engine removes manual spreadsheets, shortens update cycles, and allows pricing teams to react on the same day a regulation changes.
4. Manufacturing diversification—rather than single-country sourcing—reduces both supply risk and sudden tariff hits.
5. Three-Business-to-Consumer (3B2C) flows give scale-stage brands a gateway to regional fulfillment advantages without long-term commitments to foreign warehouses.
6. Brands should model end-to-end landed cost by cart, not by Stock Keeping Unit. Cart-level assessment captures de minimis rules, value thresholds, and free-circulation nuances that vary country by country.
7. Proactive communication with finance and legal colleagues prevents surprise costs, missed duties, or shipment holds at customs.
8. Consumer sentiment in Canada and other key markets shows early signs of rebound, confirming that disciplined cross-border planning continues to pay off.

About Matthew Merrilees

Matthew Merrilees serves as Chief Executive Officer for Global-e’s North America business. He started his career in international parcel logistics, moved through senior sales leadership posts, and ultimately joined Global-e to scale its cross-border enablement platform. Under his leadership, Global-e delivers merchant-of-record capabilities, end-to-end shipping, localized checkout, and compliance assurance for hundreds of DTC brands.

Episode Summary

Matthew outlined Global-e’s service scope: localized currency support, payment method adaptation, duty and tax calculation, merchant-of-record responsibility, shipping management, and returns orchestration. He positioned these capabilities as “barrier removal” functions that allow brands to treat international shoppers as domestic customers.

Global-e encourages brands to audit manufacturing footprint first—examining where goods originate, how they enter primary markets, and whether current sourcing plans include diversification levers. With that context, Global-e models pricing scenarios that preserve margin while keeping consumer pricing competitive. Matthew stressed that merely raising list prices by the full tariff percentage rarely works; instead, teams should average the blend of tariff-affected and tariff-neutral items across the catalogue, then adjust pricing bands accordingly.

The conversation turned toward Canada and Mexico. Many operators once labeled those markets “safe zones.” but recent weeks stripped away that assumption. Matthew explained that brands leveraging Section 321 through Mexico enjoyed duty advantages until a 150 percent tariff shock—later revised to 30 percent—changed the math overnight. Global-e’s engine adjusted within hours, but brand partners still needed clear guidance on inventory allocation and cart-level customer charges.

Brent asked whether brands now hoard inventory to which Matthew answered with a firm “no.” Most companies now favor data-informed, flexible tactics over panic-driven stockpiling. Global-e collaborates on two pricing approaches:

• Dynamic pricing—currency conversion plus duty and tax automation—fits pure-play DTC brands that can change catalog prices within minutes.
• MSRP-anchored pricing serves brands with wholesalers or country-level retail partners. In that case, Global-e helps align regional price books with an updated landed-cost model, protecting multi-channel consistency.

Both approaches rely on predictive profit simulations, not guesswork.

Global-e already runs an always-current country-pair engine. However, Matthew cautioned that product-level duty alone never solves the problem because most customs authorities apply rules at the shipment level. Cart value, shipping cost inclusion, and commodity pairing each influence the final duty owed. Any API worth using must account for those variables; otherwise, the brand still risks chargebacks or customer frustration at delivery.

Final Thoughts

This conversation confirmed that disciplined strategy, not guesswork, unlocks sustainable cross-border growth. Tariff volatility will persist, yet brands with diversified sourcing, dynamic duty engines, and clear profitability thresholds can outpace slower competitors. While regulation shifts daily, core principles hold: know your costs, inform your price books, and communicate changes across departments. Maintain that rigor and you won’t trip over the next policy headline—you’ll turn it into a prompt for incremental profit. Care to test your own {{Keyword}} under pressure? The moment arrives faster than the next customs bulletin.

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