AMERICAN E-COMMERCE BUSINESS ALLIANCE
aeba.org
June 2026
President Donald J. Trump
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500
Re: Make E-Commerce Great Again
Close China’s largest remaining loophole inside our economy and collect tens of billions in external revenue, paid entirely by foreign sellers.
Dear Mr. President,
No president has stood up for American business the way you have. Closing the de minimis loophole stopped the flood of untaxed, untraced packages pouring into the country, and your June 2026 Executive Order on Strengthening Customs Enforcement required a real, accountable importer behind every shipment. Those orders sealed the border. One door remains open, and for American businesses it is the one that matters most.
E-commerce is the greatest engine of American entrepreneurship in a generation, and it is being taken over by China. Foreign sellers, overwhelmingly Chinese, are now the majority of third-party sellers on our marketplaces and sell an estimated $220 billion a year to Americans, yet they register no U.S. company, pay no U.S. income tax, carry no liability insurance, and answer to no American court. They are, in every real sense, undocumented businesses inside our economy. By skipping the U.S. income tax, the liability insurance, and the safety-compliance costs every American competitor must pay, they hold a built-in cost advantage of 30 percent or more on the very same product. American businesses are being undercut on their own home soil, not by a better or cheaper product, but by a structural advantage our own rules hand to foreign rivals. This is not trade. It is the export of American cash, billions of dollars flowing untaxed to China every day in exchange for goods sold by companies that give nothing back.
It also decides the future of American manufacturing: a factory needs a customer, and the customers of factories are brands. At this pace there will be no American brands left for our factories to supply, and China will own the entire chain, from product development to manufacturing to the final sale to the customer, inside our own market.
In Section 8 of that same Customs Enforcement Order, you directed your Administration to gather recommendations to go further. This letter is our reply, together with a companion roadmap, Customs Modernization for the Platform Era, and a point-by-point analysis of what your Order achieved and where gaps remain. The single most important item we can put before you is one we ask your team to investigate.
We believe that foreign sellers doing substantial business here may already owe U.S. income tax on what they earn from Americans, income that goes untaxed today because they shelter under a 1984 tax treaty written before e-commerce existed. The authority appears to be on the books already, in existing law: IRC §864(b), your 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and the Supreme Court’s Wayfair decision. If that is right, the IRS could act by executive direction, without an act of Congress, with the marketplaces collecting at the source the way they already collect sales tax.
We believe an honest review would show two things. It would confirm a path to level the playing field for the American businesses now losing to competitors who follow none of the same rules. And it would identify a substantial amount of revenue that should be taxed and today is not, by a conservative estimate $9 to $60 billion a year, paid entirely by foreign sellers and not one penny by an American. It would be the purest form of the External Revenue Service you envisioned.
We are not asking you to take our word for it. We ask only that you direct the Treasury and the IRS to investigate it. We will bring everything we have to help: the law, the data, and years of frontline experience.
Mr. President, you have already begun leveling the playing field for American brands. If the review bears this out, a single executive action could finish what you started, the same way you closed the de minimis loophole: protecting the greatest engine of American entrepreneurship, restoring a fair market for hundreds of thousands of American businesses, and bringing in tens of billions from foreign sellers without taxing a single American.
We believe in Make E-Commerce Great Again (MEGA), and we believe you are the president to make it happen.
Respectfully and gratefully,
Shinghi Detlefsen
Founder, American E-Commerce Business Alliance