Tariffs Are Squeezing U.S. eCommerce: 5 Actions Marketers Should Take

U.S. eCommerce businesses are under increasing pressure as new tariffs push up the cost of imported goods. Tighter margins are forcing difficult choices across pricing, promotions, and media budgets. While finance and supply chain teams wrestle with the operational impacts, marketers have a unique opportunity, and responsibility, to respond with precision.

The path forward isn’t just about cutting spend. It’s about making smarter, data-driven choices that defend profitability and position your brand for long-term strength.

Here are five actions every eCommerce marketer should take right now.

1. Cut Waste Based on True Incremental Revenue, Not Last-Click

If finance is asking you to cut media spend as part of a company-wide savings initiative, the first step is to identify channels that are performing well, and the ones that are not.

In the worst case, your current cross-channel measurement is based on Last-Click Attribution, which is heavily biased towards favouring demand capture channels. Last-Click often recommends reducing spend on Paid Video and Paid Social, while maintaining or increasing spend on branded search. As an example, Paid Social was undervalued by Last-Click by a factor of 4.2x in our latest research .

Action: Ensure you measure the true incremental sales contribution of each channel, for example with Marketing Mix Modeling.

Pro Tip: Use Sellforte Free Trial to get a snapshot into your channels’ true ROI.

2. Don’t Sacrifice Brand Building

When margins shrink and budgets tighten, like they do now under tariff pressures, marketers face the classic temptation: go all-in on short-term performance, and pause brand investments "until things stabilize." It feels rational. It feels immediate. But it’s a dangerous mistake.

Action: Balance short-term and long-term thinking. Ensure you have good metrics in place for your awareness and brand campaigns.

3. Structure Spend Cuts as Geo Holdout Experiments

Budget cuts, while painful, can be a golden opportunity for insight. Marketers have an opportunity structure part of the finance-mandated savings as clean, controlled geo hold-out experiments. Geo hold-out tests can help uncover insights about the incrementality of different channels, which could be useful standalone information but also helps calibrate your Marketing Mix Model.

They can be trickier to execute under abnormal conditions though, if you’re making changes to your media mix more broadly and if your pricing is broadly influenced by the tariffs.

Action: Structure part of the savings into geo holdout tests to understand the incrementality of different channels.

4. Re-Consider Which Products You Advertise

Not all products are created equal—especially when tariffs hit. It’s important to understand how margins are developing in different parts of your product portfolio when tariffs are factored in.

Action: Audit your product catalog. Be careful in advertising products, which have very low margins after tariffs.

5. Re-Calculate Break-Even Bid Levels

Tariffs are increasing your cost base. If you’re operating in a mode where you can scale ad spend as long as you maintain a certain profit-level, now is the time re-calculate bid levels for each channel that enable you to reach that profit level.

It’s also important to factor in incrementality. As an example, because prospecting campaigns are more incremental than retargeting campaigns, you need to set higher Target ROAS for retargeting campaigns to achieve same profitability levels for both campaign types.

Action: Revise and re-calculate your bid levels by factoring in the change in product margins, and true incrementality of each channel.

Pro Tip: You can get a free snapshot into your channels’ incrementality factors with Sellforte's Free Trial .

Final Word: Play Offense, Not Just Defense

Tariffs are a challenge, but they can also be a catalyst to accelerate your journey to better measurement and optimization of media spend. Marketers who embrace this moment to cut waste intelligently, experiment rigorously, and modernize their measurement stack will not just survive—they’ll build a more resilient, future-ready business.

Ready to start measuring and optimizing media spend based on true incremental sales impact?  Start your Free Trial

Authors

Lauri Potka is the Chief Operating Officer at Sellforte, with over 15 years of experience in Marketing Mix Modeling, marketing measurement, and media spend optimization. Before joining Sellforte, he worked as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group, advising some of the world’s largest advertisers on data-driven marketing optimization. Follow Lauri in LinkedIn , where he is one of the leading voices in MMM and marketing measurement.