A modeled walk-through, not a data study. Your real numbers depend on your costs, and you can check them free.
Every week I get some version of the same question from a Shopify merchant: "Are the new tariffs actually eating my margin, or is everyone just panicking?"
The honest answer is that I can't tell you what's happening in your store from the outside. I don't know what you pay for goods. But I can do something useful: show you how the current tariff load moves a margin when we start from a typical assumption for your category, and let you swap in your own cost to get the real figure.
So that's what this is. Everything below is a modeled scenario under stated assumptions. None of it is a discovered statistic about how stores are doing. When I say apparel goes "from 55% to 41%," I mean: if a store runs a 55% gross margin and the tariff lands fully on landed cost and the retail price holds, the arithmetic produces about 41%. Change any of those and the number changes. That's the whole point.
I'm using one simplifying assumption throughout, stated plainly: the tariff is a duty on the imported cost of goods, and the merchant absorbs it rather than raising retail. That's the worst realistic case and the one worth seeing first. If you pass the cost through to customers, your margin holds and your price goes up instead. Most merchants land somewhere between the two.
For the tariff rate I'm using a representative current China load, because China is still the most common sourcing origin for the categories below. Your origin mix matters a lot here, which is again why your real scan beats any table I can write.
Apparel. Assume a 55% gross margin, so goods cost 45% of retail. Apply a tariff that adds roughly 30% to that landed cost, and the cost of goods climbs from 45 to about 58.5 cents on the dollar. Margin lands near 41%. That's the headline case boutique apparel merchants feel first, and it's why apparel is where I focus.
Footwear. Footwear already carried some of the highest baseline US duty rates before any of the 2026 changes, so the starting cost basis is higher. Assume a 50% margin. The same tariff math pushes cost of goods from 50 toward roughly 65 cents, dropping margin to around 35%. Footwear tends to move the most of any category here.
Electronics / accessories. Assume a slimmer 35% margin, which is common for consumer electronics resale. Goods start at 65% of retail. Add the tariff load and cost of goods can exceed 84 cents on the dollar, leaving margin near 16%. Thin-margin categories have the least room to absorb, so even a moderate duty change is the difference between a healthy SKU and an underwater one.
Beauty / personal care. Assume a 65% margin, with much of the catalog sourced domestically or from lower-tariff origins. Even applying the load to the imported share, margin often holds in the high 50s. This is the category where "the tariffs are killing everyone" simply isn't true for most stores, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Furniture / home. Assume a 45% margin on bulky imported goods. Cost of goods runs 55% of retail, and the tariff can push it past 71 cents, taking margin down toward 29%. Furniture sits between apparel and electronics on exposure, with freight amplifying the pain.
Read this as a shape, not a scoreboard. The ranking is the durable part: beauty is comfortable, apparel and furniture feel it, footwear and electronics feel it most, roughly in proportion to how thin the starting margin is and how much of the catalog is imported from a high-tariff origin. The exact percentages are only as good as the assumptions in front of them.
A few things move these numbers in the real world. Your actual margin is probably not the round number I assumed. Your sourcing origin might carry a very different rate. And several 2026 changes cut both ways: the Section 122 10% surcharge expired July 24, new Section 301 duties of 10 to 12.5% landed the same day on imports from 60 partners, apparel tariff-rate quotas that open duty-free volume for several Asian exporters become workable around September 1, and the Court of International Trade ordered CBP to refund roughly $165 billion in invalidated duties, with a refund portal now live and the government appealing. Depending on what you import and from where, you could be paying more, less, or getting money back.
That's exactly why a table can't answer your question and a scan can. Point the free tariff margin scanner at your store and it reads your public catalog in about ten seconds, no signup. Enter your own cost on a product and you get the exact margin for that SKU instead of my assumed one. Start there, then decide what, if anything, to change.
Paste your Shopify URL. The free scanner reads your public catalog in about ten seconds, no signup. Enter your own cost on a product for the exact margin on that SKU.
Scan your store free →All percentages in this post are modeled scenarios, not measured outcomes. Each category figure is produced by a single arithmetic model: starting gross margin implies cost of goods as a share of retail; a representative current China tariff rate is applied to that landed cost; retail price is held constant, so the added duty flows straight to margin. Starting margins are stated assumptions chosen to be representative of each category, informed by public benchmarks (NYU Stern industry margin data and DTC brand 10-K filings); they are not survey results. No figure in this post describes what any real store or set of stores is actually experiencing. A merchant's true margin depends on their actual cost, sourcing origin, duty classification, and pricing response, any of which can move the result substantially. The free scanner at tariffmargin.com computes a store-specific figure from a merchant's own catalog and cost inputs.