SMBs Are Done Absorbing the Tariff Hit. Here's What Comes Next

There is a number in Netstock's 2026 Tariff Impact Report that stops you mid-read: 44%. That is the share of SMBs that spent much of 2025 absorbing tariff costs rather than passing them on, betting that protecting customer relationships was worth the margin hit. For a while, it was a defensible call. Then it stopped being one.

Today, 82% of SMBs are passing costs on to customers. Of those, 92% are doing it through direct price increases. Not through quiet reformulations or smaller pack sizes. Through straightforward price hikes. That shift, from absorption to pass-through, is the clearest signal yet that the tariff environment has moved past something businesses can quietly manage around. For procurement and logistics leaders, that means supplier negotiations, contract terms, and inventory decisions are now happening inside a fundamentally different cost environment - and the pressure is not letting up.

The Problem Got Harder Before Anyone Could Fix It

One thing that complicates the narrative of "SMBs adapting to tariffs" is that the tariffs themselves kept moving. This was never a clean, single-origin problem that companies could route around once and call it solved.

Nearly half of SMBs now have exposure across two or more sourcing regions. 74% are dealing with China-linked risk specifically, but that is often just one piece of a more tangled picture. A manufacturer might be diversifying away from one Chinese supplier while still depending on Chinese inputs two tiers up the chain. The complexity compounds quietly.

That is why 60% of SMBs are now running multiple mitigation strategies at the same time. Not because they planned for it, but because a single lever, whether switching one supplier or adjusting one contract, turned out not to be enough.

Jefferson Barr, CMO at Netstock, put it plainly: "In the face of sustained disruption, the shift from wait-and-see to active mitigation is a necessity. For much of 2025, 44% of SMBs prioritized customer service by absorbing tariff costs, but that approach quickly hit its limits."

Jefferson Barr, CMO Netstock: "44% of SMBs prioritized customer service by absorbing tariff costs"

Better Equipped, Not Less Pressured

Here is the part of the data that doesn't quite fit the gloomy narrative: 82% of SMBs now say they feel better equipped to handle disruptions than they did a year ago.

That is not a small number. And it does not mean the pressure has let up, because it hasn't. What it reflects, more likely, is that companies have been forced to build capabilities they didn't previously need. Supplier relationships that were transactional are now strategic. Contract structures that assumed stable pricing have been renegotiated. More than one in three SMBs has switched suppliers outright.

None of this happened comfortably. But it happened.

The Freight Effect Most People Aren't Pricing In

Buried inside the Netstock data is a signal that matters less to individual SMBs and more to anyone operating in freight, logistics, or carrier capacity: 73% of SMBs are extending their planning horizons.

On its own, that sounds like sensible risk management. In aggregate, it creates a problem.

When thousands of businesses simultaneously start planning further out, they tend to front-load. They pull inventory forward to get ahead of anticipated cost increases or potential disruptions. That front-loading generates demand spikes followed, inevitably, by lulls. Carriers and logistics networks that were already operating under strain start absorbing that volatility into pricing and capacity.

Barr flagged this directly: "At scale, this shift could reshape freight dynamics. Longer planning cycles could also encourage front-loading, driving demand spikes followed by lulls and increasing instability across capacity, pricing, and network efficiency."

For freight forwarders and 3PLs, this is not an abstract concern. The demand irregularity being generated right now is not random. It is being baked into the planning decisions of tens of thousands of businesses, and it will show up in spot rates, capacity constraints, and service reliability over the next 12 to 18 months.

What Actually Holds Up

The businesses that entered 2026 in the strongest position were not necessarily the largest ones. They were the ones that had already done the structural work: diverse supplier bases, contracts with pricing flexibility built in, and visibility into their inventory positions across the chain.

That is the real lesson the Netstock data keeps pointing to. Scale absorbs some shocks. Structure absorbs more of them. The tariff story is not over. Anyone betting on a clean resolution, a deal here or a pause there, has already been wrong more than once. What is clear is that businesses still waiting for the environment to stabilise before making structural changes are running out of runway to make them.