White House calls Amazon’s reported move to display tariff prices “a hostile and political act”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, citing a report that Amazon plans to display tariff charges on imported goods, called the move “a hostile and political act.” 

The e-commerce giant plans to display new tariff costs next to products’ prices, political news site Punchbowl reported earlier Tuesday, citing a person familiar with the matter. The move would provide shoppers with clarity into the cost of the new levies on imported goods. 

“Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?” Leavitt said during a press briefing Tuesday. 

However, Amazon pushed back on the report, saying in a Tuesday statement to CBS News that its Amazon Haul store “considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products.” Amazon Haul was introduced late last year by the e-commerce giant to sell low-cost goods to compete with Temu and Shein.

“This was never approved and is not going to happen,” said Tim Doyle, an Amazon spokesperson.

President Trump has imposed tariffs as high as 145% on goods imported from China, while he lowered a range of tariffs on most other nations to a 10% baseline rate during a 90-day pause that began earlier this month. Tariffs are import duties that are paid by U.S. companies such as Walmart and Target, which typically pass on the added fee to consumers in the form of higher costs. 

The duties are already making foreign-made goods more expensive for U.S.-based consumers. 

Earlier this month, data showed that Amazon sellers had already hiked prices on nearly 1,000 of the top 100,000 selling products on the site, according to SmartScout, a price analysis software tool. The average price hike was about 30%. 

At the time, Amazon said the 900-plus products whose prices have risen reflect just 1% of the top 100,000 products across its site. The company also noted that the most common price hike amount was just 6%, and that SmartScout’s 30% average price figure was skewed by “a relatively small number of products that had very large increases.”

“We have not seen the average selling prices of products change up or down appreciably outside of typical fluctuations across the hundreds of millions of items on Amazon, and we continue to meet or beat prices versus other retailers on the vast majority of items,” Amazon said in a statement earlier this month to CBS MoneyWatch. 

Other retailers are introducing “tariff surcharges,” such as Dame, a sexual wellness brand, which has implemented a $5 “Trump tariff surcharge” that is automatically added to customers’ online shopping carts at checkout.