Wove speeds tariff change info for forwarders, TMS – and it’s free

“HTS is published mostly in PDFs,” he said, “so it’s unstructured and hard to really understand. And, this also coincided with [forwarder] FlexPort removing access to their free tariff calculator for a lot of people. This was around the holiday time, and we didn’t have that much going on. So we just decided to kinda build this.”

Within a couple days of launch, Wove, founded in 2022, was hosting the industry’s leading free tariff calculator that Edlin said is now getting thousands of users every week. 

“Ultimately, that became more of a tariff time machine because as these changes kept coming out, you could really use the tariff calculator and tariff simulator to go back in time and compare what the duties were on entry dates from from last year, and that’s really actually helped us go into the IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs) refund calculations,” said Edlin. “So, we’ve been working with companies to help them calculate their tariff refunds.”

The U.S. IEEPA law lets the President regulate or block certain economic transactions during a declared national emergency involving an unusual and extraordinary foreign threat.congress. President Donald Trump used it to deploy tariffs as leverage to negotiate new trade agreements.
The Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs, ruling the Act does not authorize the President to impose levies. That left Customs and Border Protection on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in refunds, and traders facing massively complex paperwork.

At the same time, the administration shifted to new tariff regimens, some implemented overnight, seemingly based on little more than Trump’s whims. “Obviously,” said Edlin, “the pace of change is not slowing down.” 

Those major changes this past week included Section 338 Canada tariffs and Section 301 levies on dozens of trading partners based on alleged forced labor manufacturing issues. But Wove has them covered.

“We’ve automated that entire process,” Edlin said. “Every time there’s an update in the Federal Register, we get a notification in [messaging app] Slack, and we have [AI] agents that then just go in and basically make all these changes [to a client’s system] automatically.”

An agent is a software system that can reason about a goal and take actions to complete it, and differs from a copilot or workflow automation tool.

Edlin said Wove’s agents, for example, turned around the Section 301 changes, which amounted to something approaching 400 pages, in an hour.

Wove has been using the tariff tool for lead generation and more recently, fielding requests from importers who want to plug it into their own systems via an API (Application Programming Interface). “Or, they wanted a product catalog concept where they could load their own SKUs (a stock keeping unit, an internal inventory code to identify and track a specific product) with HTS codes and SKU numbers, part numbers, and things like that,” Edlin said.

Academic researchers have been using Wove’s tariff data, while some importers and manufacturers are plugging the data into their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems.

Wove also supports imports into Africa, Mexico, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. It counts forwarders Hellmann Worldwide, Navia Freight, Future Forwarding, and CBX Global and importers Babcock Power, Greatneck Tools, Roto, and Wabtec (NYSE: WAB) among its customers. 

“Because we’re not a customs broker ourselves, we have no reason to to gate anyone from accessing our data,” said Edlin, “which is a little different from others that may offer similar tools. But, they have different incentives than we do.”

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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