Tariff price hikes are starting to show up in your Amazon shopping cart.
The CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, told CNBC in an interview with reporter Becky Quick at the World Economic Forum in Davos that vendors are running out of stockpiled goods imported ahead of Trump’s tariffs, and that consumers will be “starting to see more of that impact.”
“So you start to see some of the tariffs creep into some of the prices, some of the items,” said Jassy, “And you see some sellers are deciding that they’re passing on those higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices, some are deciding that they’ll absorb it to drive demand, and some are doing something in between.”
Jassy also said that though the company is striving to “keep prices as low as possible,” price hikes may sometimes be inevitable.
“At a certain point, because retail is, as you know, a mid-single digit operating margin business, if people’s costs go up by 10%, there aren’t a lot of places to absorb it,” Jassy added. “You don’t have endless options.”
While Amazon’s shopping business has its own products, it mainly serves as an ecommerce platform for other independent sellers, so it cannot control price hikes. Earlier in Trump’s tariff push, a rumour that Amazon would start displaying exactly how much tariffs contributed to the cost of an item drew the president’s ire. Amazon said it never made such plans.
In June 2025, Jassy told CNBC in an interview that many of Amazon’s third-party selling partners “forward deployed a lot of inventory” to avoid “issues with the uncertainty around where tariffs are going to settle,” adding that at that point, he did not see “prices appreciably go up.”
The bulk of Trump’s tariffs have been enacted under presidential emergency powers, including the 10% baseline levy on almost all imports. His right to impose such duties is being reviewed by the US Supreme Court after multiple small businesses filed lawsuits.
If SCOTUS rules these tariffs unconstitutional, Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury, said in a court document that the government could be on the hook to refund $1 trillion to businesses that paid. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank, 96% of the new revenue collected by the US Customs is being paid by American consumers, while foreign exporters only shouldered 4% of the burden.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
