How Tariffs Impact Online Business Valuations & Buyer Behavior

How Should Business Owners Handle Tariffs?

Quiet Light advisor Brad Wayland explains how sellers are adapting supply chains, how tariffs influence buyer confidence, and what buyers can do to find opportunity during market uncertainty.

Tariff hikes are making waves across ecommerce, SaaS, and Amazon FBA—and Brad Wayland is here to break it all down. Whether you’re importing from China, India, or elsewhere, changes in U.S. trade policy can affect your margins, deal timelines, and even business valuations.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• 0:00 Tariffs are shifting fast—here’s what we’re seeing
• 0:31 Why U.S. trade policy changes impact seller strategy
• 1:20 What that “tariff chart” actually means
• 2:10 Buyer/seller behavior after tariff announcements
• 3:05 The market doesn’t like uncertainty—how that affects deals
• 3:40 Why Chinese suppliers are absorbing tariff costs
• 4:30 What sellers are doing right now
• 5:14 What buyers should be doing during tariff chaos
• 6:00 Final advice for entrepreneurs facing economic shifts

TRANSCRIPT

00:00 Tariffs and Online Business Impact

Hey guys, let’s talk about [Music] tariffs. Tariffs is a big topic in our world these days. In fact, since Trump and the Trump administration has rolled out the tariff changes in the United States on Liberation Day, I have had so many buyers and sellers, future sellers contacting me and saying, “Hey, what’s going on with the tariffs? What do we need to know? How do we navigate this? 

00:31 How U.S. Trade Policy Shapes Seller Energy

How can we potentially mitigate some of the risks here? So, let’s just talk broadly about where we’re at right now. Tariffs are going up. The US has sort of been abused according to the current administration on tariffs where we allow people to free trade with us in the US, but they don’t allow us to free trade with them. And so, President Donald Trump, he’s come from this perspective of I want to even the playing field. Now, on Liberation Day, I don’t know if you saw, there’s like a big chart and it showed all these different tariffs and what we were going to charge another country. It said this is what the country charges the US and then now this is what we’re going to charge them in return. The reason they created that chart was to try to make it look like we were giving people a really good deal. I want to make a couple of comments about that. First, that number that we said they were charging us was not the tariff. I know that sounds strange. 

01:20 Reading the E-Commerce Tariff Chart

Let me say it again. That number that was on that chart, it was not the tariff. It was actually a representation of the GDP shortfall we had in the trade relationship we have with that country. Calculated out into a percentage that they called the tariff. I don’t know why they did the math that way. I’m not here to like take sides politically on it. I’m just letting you know that’s not actually the tariff. So Cambodia, it says they charged us a 97% tariff and then it showed that we charged them a new tariff of 49%. So the p perspective they were trying to give was, hey, we’ve been tariffed to death. They charge us 100% if we sell we want to sell this trinket into Cambodia. They mark it up by 100% just in tariffs, which means we’re not selling it into Cambodia. 

02:10 Buyer and Seller Reactions

And they said, “So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to turn around and we’re going to charge 47.” Okay, so let me cut to the chase on where I’m going with this. The markets have been very volatile. If you follow the stock market or anything like that, they’ve been down and up and every little headline what Trump says is making the stock market go up or down every single day. So here’s here’s the deal. I think he was doing sort of art of the deal. That’s that’s a book that Donald Trump wrote years and years ago. It is you ask for the moon so that you can land somewhere reasonable. So, what we’ve got now is 75 countries say they want to do a deal and so things are normalizing. What did I see on our listings when these things announced? Let me tell you, for the first two weeks, it turned into crickets. People that were looking at deals paused. People that were thinking about buying a business paused. But after about two weeks, my inbox picked up with inquiries. My phone started ringing. Everything started return. 

03:05 Market Uncertainty on Deal & Valuations

So, the market doesn’t like uncertainty. And so as we’ve kind of been in this realm and they’re saying, “Hey, we’re making deals. We’re going to do a deal with India. We’re going to do a deal with Vietnam. We’re going to do all these deals.” Things are starting to normalize. So we’re starting to get that and that’s good and that’s helping. What are my sellers doing? Well, this is really interesting. So I’ve got several listings that are tied to China specifically, which is where the most intense tariff talk has been going on. In every single instance, I have three examples. In every single instance, the Chinese supplier when asked by my sellers, the Chinese supplier either absorbed 50 to 100% of the new tariff cost. 

03:40 Chinese Suppliers Absorbing Tariffs

So, I want to talk about leverage for a second. I hear on CNBC all the time that the US has no leverage. We need all these Chinese goods. There’s probably some truth to that. But I want to just mention that one of the thing that’s going on here is we do have some leverage because what’s happening is these Chinese manufacturers when they find out that these buyers in the US are Amazon FBA stores, those kinds of people, they’re afraid of losing them so much that they are saying we’ll absorb the cost. We’ll absorb 50%. We’ll absorb 100%. We’ll work with you so that we can not have have you have to pay all this tariff or pass it on to your consumer. So, one thing I want to say is there is a natural economic thing here. We do have some leverage here in the US and I think that we will, you know, kind of get through that because I’m seeing these Chinese manufacturers work very hard to try to strike the deal. 

04:30 How Sellers Are Adapting

Point number two, what are my sellers doing? They’re waiting. And I’ll tell you why. The talking about huge tariffs is big-time trouble for the economy. The Trump team has a window about this big to do this. He did it less than half a year after he took office because he’s saying if I got to break something, I need to break it fast and then get back. So, everyone’s just kind of chilled out. I don’t have anybody calling me crying. I don’t have anybody calling me saying the sky is falling, bro. What do we do? Everybody’s kind of like, just give it time. Let’s just see what happens. Okay. Now, if you’re a buyer, what could you be doing in these times? 

05:14 Buyer Strategies During Tariff Chaos

Though we’re going to get some trade deals and it’s probably going to make trade for different suppliers around the globe more attractive. It’s going to create a little bit of a buyer market. So, if you’re buying, uncertainty is something you can capitalize in on and get some good deals. We have seen an uptick in people that want to go to the exit doors. Anytime there’s uncertainty, we’ll see an uptick in people that say, “Hey, I think now’s the time to sell because I don’t like this uncertainty.” So, as a buyer, you have an edge. You can come in. You can find a business that something that might look a little bit rocky, you can find out, hey, do we have a path here? And by knowing that path, we can exploit that path and we might be able to get a better deal than we would get if there was no great dog. Whether you’re a seller, whether you’re a buyer, at Quiet Light, our advisors, we’re always here. We’re looking at the pulse of the economy. 

06:00

We’re trying to figure out what’s going on with trade deals for buyers, for sellers, what’s happening in the in the macro picture. We’re always trying to assess what’s going on so that we can give the best advice. So, don’t forget to reach out to your advisor if you don’t have one. You just go to QuietLight.com and we can get you to somebody that can help you navigate difficult situations like this tariff situation. [Music]