8BitDo Suspends US Shipments After Tariffs Cause Skyrocketing Prices

After the infamous US trade war escalated tariffs on Chinese goods to as high as 145%, many PC hardware and peripherals vendors have felt the pressure, with hardware companies, like Framework, previously both increasing prices on certain products and suspending orders on others altogether. In the case of Framework, this was later overturned when the US administration announced an exemption for certain electronics, including smartphones and computers. 8BitDo, however, has not been so lucky, with Polygon recently discovering that items not currently in the US warehouse cannot be shipped to the US. We confirmed this with a brief test of our own and found the same warning that our order could not be shipped to the US.

Curiously, there are no warnings on individual product pages or anywhere else on the 8BitDo website that give any indication that 8BitDo will not be able to fulfil orders with US shipping addresses. It’s only after the products are added to the cart and buyers head to check out that the warning appears. In the case of Polygon, the warning specified which items could not be fulfilled, indicating that US warehouses still had stock of certain items, but when we tested it, the warning was less specific, reading only “Shipping not available. Your order cannot be shipped to the selected address. Review your address to ensure it’s correct and try again, or select a different address.” Amazon, on the other hand, still seems to have stock for at least some of 8BitDo’s items available. We tested the 8BitDo Retro Mechanical Keyboard C64 Edition, which is unavailable via the 8BitDo site but is still listed at $99.99 on Amazon. Recently, Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders were also suspended due to US tariffs on Chinese goods, and Gamers Nexus also recently published a deep dive detailing the sweeping effects of the increased pricing and uncertainty from the perspective of various US-based PC hardware vendors and system integrators.