Retail companies spanning from the luxury sector to lower-value goods are using a tariff arbitrage strategy within their supply chains to lower tariff bills and keep costs down for consumers. The business model, called B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer), is changing the way retailers handle orders placed by consumers on a company’s website, routing the transaction to a wholesale platform. Typically, an item purchased online is directly sold to the consumer. But with President Trump’s trade war hitting the retail sector hard and hitting many manufacturing hubs where retailers source goods with high tariffs, this type of transaction is now more often being handled through a middleman company that acts as a merchant of record, acting on behalf of the retailer as a U.S. entity. ESW and Global-e are companies that act as a merchant of record for retailers selling products into the United States. Once a U.S. consumer purchases the product on a retail website, the actual transaction is routed to the retail middleman that can purchase the product at a wholesale price from the retailer. The middleman company ships and pays the U.S. tariff on the product’s wholesale price on behalf of the retailer. According to Eric Eichmann, CEO of ESW, the difference in paying tariffs on the wholesale rather than the retail prices ranges from 30%-60%. Some logistics experts describe it as an example of how clever entrepreneurs can rewrite playbooks on the fly to succeed in evolving markets. Others worry that “tariff hacking” is not a sustainable long-term strategy and ultimately cannot keep inflation down.