A few weeks back, I wrote about companies shifting manufacturing from China to Vietnam, only to discover their supply chains were still deeply tied to China through components, machinery and tooling. Think of this as the follow-up. Many of those same brands make a similar miscalculation on the sales side: they diversify production, but continue selling the overwhelming majority of their goods into a single market, the United States. For all the talk about global e-commerce, cross-border sales still account for less than one-fifth of total online commerce.

The logic behind spreading out manufacturing is simple: depending too heavily on one country creates exposure. That is the foundation of the “China plus one” strategy, where companies build an additional production base outside China so their entire supply chain is not anchored in one place. Investors have encouraged that shift for years. But the same principle applies to demand. If it is risky to rely on one country to make your products, it is equally risky to rely on one country to buy them. When nearly all customers are concentrated in a single market, revenue becomes tied to that market’s currency, consumer spending patterns and trade policy. If any of those factors turn against you, the impact hits the whole business at once.

The rules for that one market won’t sit still

The past year shows how quickly that risk can surface for a brand built almost entirely around the U.S. customer. De minimis, the rule that allowed shipments valued under $800 to enter the United States without duties, had supported low-cost cross-border delivery for roughly a decade. That changed first for China and Hong Kong on May 2, 2025, and then for the rest of the world on August 29, 2025. Congress had previously set the program’s end for 2027. Instead, the deadline moved up by more than 18 months, leaving brands that had priced their goods around duty-free entry scrambling with only weeks to react.

Tariff policy has been just as volatile. In February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the administration could not use IEEPA, a 1977 law, as authority for its “reciprocal” tariff program because the statute did not give the president tariff-setting power. Those duties were terminated on February 24, 2026. On that same day, however, the administration reinstated a 10% tariff covering nearly every country under a different legal framework. Companies that already paid the earlier tariffs are now left waiting to learn whether they will ever be reimbursed.

Very little of this could have been neatly planned for, and that is exactly the danger of building a business around one destination market. A brand selling across a dozen countries absorbs a policy shock across only part of its revenue base. A brand selling almost exclusively into one country absorbs the shock everywhere, with no other market large enough to soften the blow while the first one resets.

The customers are already there

But international expansion is not just a risk-management strategy. It is also a growth opportunity. The market beyond the United States is large, and it is accelerating. Cross-border e-commerce is projected to rise from about $550 billion in 2025 to nearly $2 trillion by 2034. Brands already participating in global online retail are not relying on hope alone. In a 2025 survey of senior U.S. e-commerce executives, 91% said international sales are profitable, while almost half reported that overseas markets already generate more than 20% of their total revenue.

Going global no longer takes a giant

Ten years ago this argument fell apart on the practical side. Selling abroad meant building most of a company a second time in every market. A local entity, local payment methods, local tax handling and a warehouse stocked with inventory before you had a single order to justify it. Doing it that way ran anywhere from around $150,000 for an easy lane like the U.S. into Canada to north of $1 million for a full move into Europe and the U.K., and the first year usually ran at a loss.

Most of that’s now avoidable, because brands have fulfillment options today that didn’t exist before. With direct fulfillment, for example, brands can skip regional warehousing altogether by holding all their stock in one place near the factory (i.e., a single warehouse in China) and shipping directly to customers anywhere, order by order. That removes the parts that used to make expansion expensive: the local entity, the inventory committed to a market before it’s proven and the carrier contracts signed country by country. What’s left is mostly ad spend. A brand turns on ads in a new market to test it. If it doesn’t respond, the ads go back off. The only loss is the spend, not a warehouse lease and a container of unsold stock.

With the cost of being wrong mostly gone, what’s left is the exposure itself. A brand that spreads its supply chain across three countries to avoid depending on one, then sells into a single market, hasn’t escaped the risk. It’s just moved it, from the factory to the checkout.