Rattan and wood decor, small parcels from Binh Duong to buyers in the US, all on FedEx with duties billed back to my account, so FedEx was the importer of record and paid the IEEPA duties (the emergency tariffs) on my behalf. I put my tracking numbers into their refund portal. Some show the refund as received since the middle of May, and nothing has reached me. Their website says payouts would start on the tenth of August but says nothing about how the money comes back, and customer service points me at the same page.
Until this lands, my landed cost on those orders is wrong. Has anyone here actually had money arrive from FedEx, and by what route?
Confirm who is named importer before you believe the portal. It matches on entry numbers, and it only knows entries FedEx made on its own bond. A tracking number from an entry filed under any other importer comes back empty. That reads like a refusal. It is not one. You say FedEx was importer of record. Pull the 7501 on a few parcels and check the box anyway. Then you know which of your numbers the portal can ever answer.
Two questions are tangled here. First, parcels the portal has nothing on: those entries have not left CBP yet, and nothing FedEx does will hurry them. Second, parcels marked received but unpaid. For that group there is no customs remedy to point at; it is a debt FedEx's brokerage owes you. Put each entry number to them in writing and file the answers, because whoever pays eventually will not tell you which parcel it was for.
The parcels showing nothing are sitting in a bucket nobody can move yet. Courier shipments under $2,500 go in as informal entries, which customs closes out fast. Roughly one month of those entries got into CAPE phase 1, the refund programme, and the closed informals were left out of both phase 1 and phase 2. The couriers are waiting on CBP to open that door. When it does, budget roughly 90 days before money starts and another 90 to reconcile it per tracking number. Nothing to chase this week.
This does not add up for me. I have seen the opposite reported: a FedEx rep telling an importer at the end of July that FedEx had not received any funds from the government yet and would not pay out until it did. Your portal shows received since May. Both cannot be true for the same parcel. So what does received actually mean there: that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has sent the money, or only that it has approved the refund? I had assumed it meant cash in hand.
The part I would prepare for is the reconciliation. There is talk that the money will go back to whatever card was charged, and some of these entries go back to May 2025, so it may land on a card statement nobody is watching. I keep a line per tracking number: duty paid, date, the card or account it left from. When a refund arrives with no covering note, and it will arrive with no covering note, that line is the only thing that ties it to a parcel.
