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

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.

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 no threshold to fall under, either. CBP states that Proclamations 10895 and 10896 provide for no minimum amount of derivative steel or aluminum content — the metal share changes the size of the bill, never whether the rule reaches you.

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; the commercial invoice is what tells US customs the product is anything other than all metal.

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 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.