By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 10

For traders selling imported clothing over a phone, the duty is a caption problem before it is an economics one.

For the small traders who sell imported clothing over WhatsApp and Instagram, the 61.5% charge on certain Chinese goods is not an abstraction but a caption problem. Every jacket and pair of trainers sourced from a Guangzhou supplier now carries a heavier landed cost, and the seller has to decide whether to raise the sticker price, absorb the difference or explain it. The Namibian set out how the charge is built, and the online resellers were among the first to feel it.

Apparel is where the rate bites hardest. Knitted and crocheted clothing was among Namibia’s larger consumer imports from China, worth about US$21 million in 2024 by COMTRADE figures, and much of it reaches shoppers through informal and digital sellers rather than formal chains. For them, a 45% duty on clothing plus import tax is a direct hit to a thin margin.

The margin maths of a social sale

A reseller who buys a garment cheaply abroad and sells it through a phone has little room to hide a duty. Once customs adds up to 45% and import tax adds another layer, the choice is stark: lift the advertised price and risk the scroll-past, or hold the price and watch the margin thin toward nothing. Neither is comfortable on a feed where the next seller is one swipe away.

This is why the charge lands differently online than in a formal store. A boutique can bury a duty in a broad markup across many lines, while a single-product post cannot. The openness of social selling, usually its strength, becomes a constraint when every follower can compare the new price with last month’s.

On a feed, a tariff has nowhere to hide, and the price simply moves.

Turning a cost into a message

The sharper sellers are treating the duty as content rather than concealing it. Explaining why a price has risen, naming the customs charge and showing the landed-cost breakdown, turns an awkward increase into a credibility signal, positioning the seller as honest about costs rather than opportunistic about prices. In a market thick with unexplained mark-ups, that candour can hold a following.

It also reframes the pitch. A seller who cannot win on price can compete on service, curation and trust, and the tariff gives a ready reason to talk about value instead of cheapness. The message shifts from being the cheapest import to being the reliable local seller who tells a customer exactly what they are paying for.

When you cannot beat the price, explain it, because candour is its own marketing.

Sourcing shifts what the channel rewards

The duty is nudging some sellers to change what they stock, and the digital channel makes the shift visible fast. Locally made or customs-union-sourced clothing that carries no China duty can be priced more keenly, and sellers who pivot toward it can advertise a price stability their China-only rivals cannot promise into the next season.

Discovery follows the offer. Social commerce rewards sellers who post consistently and convert reliably, and a supplier base that avoids the 61.5% ceiling supports steadier pricing and fewer apologetic posts about increases. The catalogue decision and the marketing decision are, increasingly, the same decision.

What a seller sources now shapes what the feed will let them promise.

The shopper reads the whole basket

Shoppers do not see a tariff schedule; they see a price that moved, and they judge the seller by how it moved. A clear, consistent explanation across a seller’s posts builds the sense that prices are fair rather than arbitrary, which matters more online, where reputation is public and a screenshot of last week’s price is always within reach.

The risk is a race to the bottom among sellers who quietly eat the duty to hold price, exhausting their margins until they exit. The healthier response is to lift the conversation above price, toward reliability, returns and locally sourced lines, so the sale rests on more than being the cheapest import on the timeline.

The customer forgives a higher price faster than an unexplained one.

For an online retailer, a social seller or a digital-marketing operator, the 61.5% charge is a repricing and a repositioning at once. The decision is whether to keep competing on the landed price of Chinese stock, or to rebuild the pitch around transparency and locally sourced lines that let the price hold steady while the story does the selling.

Sources: The Namibian; Namibia imports of knitted apparel from China (Trading Economics); E-commerce in Namibia (Lloyds Bank Trade)