With Prime Day 2025 almost upon us, Amazon is touting its plans to expand its delivery network to reach small towns, especially in rural areas. 

The goal is to bring same-day and next-day delivery to more than 4,000 communities by the end of 2025, Amazon said Monday. It called out destinations including Lewes, Delaware; Asbury Iowa and North Padre Island, Texas. 

This year’s Prime Day will be taking place July 8 to 11, and it’s the first time the shopping event will last longer than two days. 

The online shopping giant earlier said that by the end of 2026 it plans to have tripled its delivery network with a multibillion-dollar expansion that will result in Amazon reaching more than 13,000 ZIP codes, speeding up delivery times for millions of people. 

«This investment will also grow our rural delivery network’s footprint to over 200 delivery stations, and we estimate it will create over 100,000 new jobs and driving opportunities through a wide range of full-time, part-time and flexible positions in our buildings and on the roads,» Udit Madan, senior vice president of worldwide operations at Amazon, said in a statement.

James Bricknell, senior editor and e-commerce expert at CNET, said the expansion is a smart move for Amazon. «If they can cut out the other carriers, they can control the prices businesses pay to them, making it cheaper for Amazon in the long run,» he said.

Making deliveries cheaper would be an important factor for Amazon, given this comes at a moment when President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda is looming and expected to increase prices on products across Amazon. Earlier this week, the tech giant said it had no plans to roll out a feature that notes cost increases on its website.

The company’s expansion news comes after Amazon announced its next Prime Day Sale for this July. Bricknell added that he’s curious to see how much pushback the company could get from rural towns. «Small towns don’t often like large warehouses blotting the landscape so Amazon might have a fight there,» he said.

The expansion to rural communities is expected to help support small businesses in these areas. Small businesses can send deliveries through the Amazon Hub Delivery program so business owners can deliver their products to customers.

President Donald Trump’s second term economic plan can be summed up in one word: tariffs. As his barrage of import taxes went into overdrive in recent months, markets trembled and business leaders sounded alarms about the economic damage they would cause. Now, a new report from research firm Conference Board has found a sizable drop in consumer confidence across all demographics since Trump introduced his import tax policies in the spring. If that lack of confidence in the economy sounds familiar, I might be able to help you make sense of the tariff situation.

Despite recent uncertainties, Trump has continued to barrel forward, doubling the tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and announcing a new deal that would see the rate against China increase to 55% — all of which will likely impact your cost of living. That all came after Trump’s plans hit their biggest roadblock yet in court, when late last month the US Court of International Trade ruled that Trump had overstepped his authority when he imposed tariffs. This ruling was eventually stayed, but the fight is likely to see a final ruling from the Supreme Court in the future.

However things shake out in the end, the initial ruling certainly came as a relief to many, given the chaos and uncertainty that Trump’s tariffs have caused thus far. For his part, Trump has recently lashed out against companies — Apple and Walmart, for example — that have reacted to the tariffs or discussed their impacts in ways he dislikes. Apple has been working to move manufacturing for the US market from China to relatively less-tariffed India, to which Trump has threatened them with a 25% penalty rate if they don’t bring manufacturing to the US instead. Experts have predicted that a US-made iPhone, for example, would cost consumers about $3,500. During a recent earnings call, Walmart warned that prices would rise on things like toys, tech and food at some point in the summer, which prompted Trump to demand the chain eat the costs themselves, another unlikely scenario.

Amid all this noise, you might still be wondering: What exactly are tariffs and what will they mean for me?

The short answer: Expect to pay more for at least some goods and services. For the long answer, keep reading, and for more, check out CNET’s price tracker for 11 popular and tariff-vulnerable products.

What are tariffs?

Put simply, a tariff is a tax on the cost of importing or exporting goods by a particular country. So, for example, a «60% tariff» on Chinese imports would be a 60% tax on the price of importing, say, computer components from China.

Trump has been fixated on imports as the centerpiece of his economic plans, often claiming that the money collected from taxes on imported goods would help finance other parts of his agenda. The US imports $3 trillion of goods from other countries annually. 

The president has also, more recently, shown a particular fixation on trade deficits, claiming that the US having a trade deficit with any country means that country is ripping the US off. This is a flawed understanding of the matter, as a lot of economists have said, deficits are often a simple case of resource realities: Wealthy nations like the US buy specific things from nations that have them, while those nations might in turn not be wealthy enough to buy much of anything from the US.

While Trump deployed tariffs in his first term, notably against China, he ramped up his plans more significantly for the 2024 campaign, promising 60% tariffs against China and a universal 20% tariff on all imports into the US. Now, tariffs against China are more than double that amount and a universal tariff on all exports is a reality.

«Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,» Trump said at a campaign stop in Michigan last year. At one point, he called himself «Tariff Man» in a post on Truth Social. 

Who pays the cost of tariffs?

Trump repeatedly claimed, before and immediately after returning to the White House, that the country of origin for an imported good pays the cost of the tariffs and that Americans would not see any price increases from them. However, as economists and fact-checkers stressed, this is not the case.

The companies importing the tariffed goods — American companies or organizations in this case — pay the higher costs. To compensate, companies can raise their prices or absorb the additional costs themselves.

So, who ends up paying the price for tariffs? In the end, usually you, the consumer. For instance, a universal tariff on goods from Canada would increase Canadian lumber prices, which would have the knock-on effect of making construction and home renovations more expensive for US consumers. While it is possible for a company to absorb the costs of tariffs without increasing prices, this is not at all likely, at least for now.

Speaking with CNET, Ryan Reith, vice president of International Data’s worldwide mobile device tracking programs, explained that price hikes from tariffs, especially on technology and hardware, are inevitable in the short term. He estimated that the full amount imposed on imports by Trump’s tariffs would be passed on to consumers, which he called the «cost pass-through.» Any potential efforts for companies to absorb the new costs themselves would come in the future, once they have a better understanding of the tariffs, if at all.

Which Trump tariffs have gone into effect?

Following Trump’s «Liberation Day» announcements on April 2, the following tariffs are in effect:

• A 50% tariff on all steel and aluminum imports, doubled from 25% as of June 4.
• A 30% tariff on all Chinese imports until the new deal touted by Trump takes effect, after which it will purportedly go up to 55%. China, being a major focus of Trump’s trade agenda, this rate has had a rate notably higher than others and has steadily increased as Beijing returned fire with tariffs of its own, peaking at 145% before trade talks commenced.
• 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico are not covered under the 2018 USMCA trade agreement brokered during Trump’s first term. The deal covers roughly half of all imports from Canada and about a third of those from Mexico, so the rest are subject to the new tariffs. Energy imports not covered by USMCA will be taxed at only 10%.
• A 25% tariff on all foreign-made cars and auto parts.
• A sweeping overall 10% tariff on all imported goods.

For certain countries that Trump said were more responsible for the US trade deficit, Trump imposed what he called «reciprocal» tariffs that exceed the 10% level: 20% for the 27 nations that make up the European Union, 26% for India, 24% for Japan and so on. These were meant to take effect on April 9 but were delayed by 90 days due to historic stock market volatility, which makes the new effective date July 8.

Trump’s claim that these reciprocal tariffs are based on high tariffs imposed against the US by the targeted countries has drawn intense pushback from experts and economists, who have argued that some of these numbers are false or potentially inflated. For example, the above chart says a 39% tariff from the EU, despite its average tariff for US goods being around 3%. Some of the tariffs are against places that are not countries but tiny territories of other nations. The Heard and McDonald Islands, for example, are uninhabited. We’ll dig into the confusion around these calculations below.

Notably, that minimum 10% tariff will not be on top of those steel, aluminum and auto tariffs. Canada and Mexico were also spared from the 10% minimum additional tariff imposed on all countries the US trades with.

On April 11, the administration said smartphones, laptops and other consumer electronics, along with flat panel displays, memory chips and semiconductors, were exempt from reciprocal tariffs. But it wasn’t clear whether that would remain the case or whether such products might face different fees later.

How were the Trump reciprocal tariffs calculated?

The numbers released by the Trump administration for its barrage of «reciprocal» tariffs led to widespread confusion among experts. Trump’s own claim that these new rates were derived by halving the tariffs already imposed against the US by certain countries was widely disputed, with critics noting that some of the numbers listed for certain countries were much higher than the actual rates and some countries had tariff rates listed despite not specifically having tariffs against the US at all.

In a post to X that spread fast across social media, finance journalist James Surowiecki said that the new reciprocal rates appeared to have been reached by taking the trade deficit the US has with each country and dividing it by the amount the country exports to the US. This, he explained, consistently produced the reciprocal tariff percentages revealed by the White House across the board.

«What extraordinary nonsense this is,» Surowiecki wrote about the finding.

The White House later attempted to debunk this idea, releasing what it claimed was the real formula, though it was quickly determined that this formula was arguably just a more complex version of the one Surowiecki deduced.

What will the Trump tariffs do to prices?

In short: Prices are almost certainly going up, if not now, then eventually. That is, if the products even make it to US shelves at all, as some tariffs will simply be too high for companies to bother dealing with.

While the effects of a lot of tariffs might not be felt straight away, some potential real-world examples have already emerged. Microsoft has increased prices across the board for its Xbox gaming brand, with its flagship Xbox Series X console jumping 20% from $500 to $600. Elsewhere, Kent International, one of the main suppliers of bicycles to Walmart, announced that it would be stopping imports from China, which account for 90% of its stock.

Speaking about Trump’s tariff plans just before they were announced, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said that they would generate $6 trillion in revenue over the next decade. Given that tariffs are most often paid by consumers, CNN characterized this as potentially «the largest tax hike in US history.» New estimates from the Yale Budget Lab, cited by Axios, predict that Trump’s new tariffs will cause a 2.3% increase in inflation throughout 2025. This translates to about a $3,800 increase in expenses for the average American household.

Reith, the IDC analyst, told CNET that Chinese-based tech companies, like PC makers Acer, Asus and Lenovo, have «100% exposure» to these import taxes as they currently stand, with products like phones and computers the most likely to take a hit. He also said that the companies best positioned to weather the tariff impacts are those that have moved some of their operations out of China to places like India, Thailand and Vietnam, singling out the likes of Apple, Dell and HP. Samsung, based in South Korea, is also likely to avoid the full force of Trump’s tariffs. 

In an effort to minimize its tariff vulnerability, Apple has begun to move the production of goods for the US market from China to India.

Will tariffs impact prices immediately?

In the short term — the first days or weeks after a tariff takes effect — maybe not. There are still a lot of products in the US imported pre-tariffs and on store shelves, meaning the businesses don’t need a price hike to recoup import taxes. Once new products need to be brought in from overseas, that’s when you’ll see prices start to climb because of tariffs or you’ll see them become unavailable. 

That uncertainty has made consumers anxious. CNET’s survey revealed that about 38% of shoppers feel pressured to make certain purchases before tariffs make them more expensive. About 10% say they have already made certain purchases in hopes of getting them in before the price hikes, while 27% said they have delayed purchases for products that cost more than $500. Generally, this worry is the most acute concerning smartphones, laptops and home appliances.

Mark Cuban, the billionaire businessman and Trump critic, voiced concerns about when to buy certain things in a post on Bluesky just after Trump’s «Liberation Day» announcements. In it, he suggested that consumers might want to stock up on certain items before tariff inflation hits.

«It’s not a bad idea to go to the local Walmart or big box retailer and buy lots of consumables now,» Cuban wrote. «From toothpaste to soap, anything you can find storage space for, buy before they have to replenish inventory. Even if it’s made in the USA, they will jack up the price and blame it on tariffs.»

CNET’s Money team recommends that before you make any purchase, especially a high-ticket item, be sure that the expenditure fits within your budget and your spending plans. Buying something you can’t afford now because it might be less affordable later can be burdensome, to say the least.

What is the goal of the White House tariff plan?

The typical goal behind tariffs is to discourage consumers and businesses from buying the tariffed, foreign-sourced goods and encourage them to buy domestically produced goods instead. When implemented in the right way, tariffs are generally seen as a useful way to protect domestic industries. 

One of the stated intentions for Trump’s tariffs is along those lines: to restore American manufacturing and production. However, the White House also claims to be having negotiations with numerous countries looking for tariff exemptions, and some officials have also floated the idea that the tariffs will help finance Trump’s tax cuts.

You don’t have to think about those goals for too long before you realize that they’re contradictory: If manufacturing moves to the US or if a bunch of countries are exempt from tariffs, then tariffs aren’t actually being collected and can’t be used to finance anything. This and many other points have led a lot of economists to allege that Trump’s plans are misguided. 

In terms of returning — or «reshoring» — manufacturing in the US, tariffs are a better tool for protecting industries that already exist because importers can fall back on them right away. Building up the factories and plants needed for this in the US could take years, leaving Americans to suffer under higher prices in the interim. 

That problem is worsened by the fact that the materials needed to build those factories will also be tariffed, making the costs of «reshoring» production in the US too heavy for companies to stomach. These issues, and the general instability of American economic policies under Trump, are part of why experts warn that Trump’s tariffs could have the opposite effect: keeping manufacturing out of the US and leaving consumers stuck with inflated prices. Any factories that do get built in the US because of tariffs also have a high chance of being automated, canceling out a lot of job creation potential. To give you one real-world example of this: When warning customers of future price hikes, toy maker Mattel also noted that it had no plans to move manufacturing to the US.

Trump has reportedly been fixated on the notion that Apple’s iPhone — the most popular smartphone in the US market — can be manufactured entirely in the US. This has been broadly dismissed by experts, for a lot of the same reasons mentioned above, but also because an American-made iPhone could cost upward of $3,500. One report from 404 Media dubbed the idea «a pure fantasy.» The overall sophistication and breadth of China’s manufacturing sector have also been cited, with CEO Tim Cook stating in 2017 that the US lacks the number of tooling engineers to make its products.

For more, see how tariffs might raise the prices of Apple products and find some expert tips for saving money.

There’s a lot to get excited about in Warframe’s Isleweaver expansion — which is free to play today on PlayStation, Xbox and PC. The update links the time-lost Warframe 1999 and the timeless islands of Duviri, pushes the Void War narrative arc forward and gives tight-knit player guilds a new large-scale operation to contribute to.

The biggest allure of a new update for many players will always be the shiny new toys, and Isleweaver has tons of those too. A new whip and throwable clustered barbs will make a fine addition to any stealthy player’s arsenal, while endgame builds will benefit from a new Incarnon weapon that’ll evolve and gain special abilities in the heat of battle.

But the most impactful addition to every Tenno’s toolkit is Oraxia, the 61st unique Warframe that players can pilot. She’s the culmination of a years-long community meme about adding a Spider-Frame into the game, and you’ll soon get a chance to scuttle around on spindly legs, summon an army of multilimbed children and assassinate enemies from above.

But it turns out that deploying extra legs and climbing on walls took an immense amount of effort to make work in Warframe, another challenge for a team that continues pushing itself to make wild fantasies playable in the game.

Oraxia «was definitely something that we only did because we’re crazy,» Warframe Design Director Pablo Alonso joked. «Honestly, we shouldn’t have done it. But at the same time, I’m happy we did, even though it pushed the team a lot to get this done.»

I spoke with Alonso and Warframe Creative Director Rebecca Ford to find out more about how Oraxia evolved from concept to reality, the stresses of modeling a completely new type of Warframe ability, and the challenges of creating this fearsome arachnid’s boss fight.

A skittering threat stalks the shadows

Warframe is all about empowering players to pick a power fantasy and live it out on the galactic stage.

Whether you enjoy playing more traditional roles, like a hack-and-slash knight or a damage-soaking tank, or you get your kicks from playing more unorthodox characters, like Sun Wukong or a walking nuclear reactor, there’s a frame in the game for nearly everybody’s favorite play style.

Each Warframe has to widen the net a little more, doing something completely different from the previous playable characters. The vision for Oraxia was actually quite simple: Like Spider-Man, she does whatever a spider can.

«She’s a predator,» said Alonso. «She lurks, she strikes, and she has her little army. That’s the core theme we were going for with her.»

Unlike in-your-face tanky frames, stealthy Warframes strike from the shadows, going invisible or lulling enemies into a deep slumber. When you play with Oraxia, you’ll skitter on walls with her ultimate ability and engage with your foes from above — they’ll become your prey.

«The walking with the elongated legs is the most exciting part of her kit,» said Ford. «Her ultimate move set is so cool, I feel like it’s unlike anything we’ve ever done before.»

«Especially once you start web whipping between walls and stuff, it makes the game feel very different and it’s a lot of fun,» Alonso added. «It almost makes you think of the game in a little bit of a different way, which is what we want.»

Alonso explained that gameplay diversity is one of the most important design pillars guiding the Warframe team, and that Oraxia already feels like a success because there’s nothing else in the game that compares with the feeling of popping out extra legs and web-swinging around the map.

«It’s very satisfying,» Ford said. «It’s a testament to not only the mechanics that were put in, but sometimes you just see the sound team hit with a small WAV file that makes all the difference. The sound for the web is excellent.

«All those little pieces come together when you have people working in their craft so excellently to create that satisfying button click,» Ford said. «Because at the end of the day, that’s all we’re doing, right? We’re putting together buttons and dressing them up in a way that makes it feel like something that’s never been in Warframe before.»

More legs meant more design challenges

Believe it or not, Oraxia existed far before the Spider-Frame meme took root in the Warframe community. Ford said the Warframe team wanted to piece this frame together as far back as 2023.

While developer Digital Extremes has a very close-knit relationship with Warframe players, Oraxia’s development process was largely unaltered by the memetic feedback the team was constantly bombarded with.

«For us, this was always a character that needed the whole treatment,» Alonso said. «There are memes that can be hard to overcome — think ‘Hydroid trailer‘ — but this one wasn’t much of a problem because we had so many cool concepts for what the Warframe was going to be. The meme of it being a secret was just kind of fun for us.»

What made Digital Extremes hold off on Oraxia for so long? Understandably, bringing this frame to fruition was something of a design nightmare.

«The perfect summary is that this was the ‘Oh, god, what have we done?’ Warframe,» said Ford.

Alonso explained that Oraxia was far more complex to create than the average Warframe because there were so many considerations that needed to be made regarding the legs that appear during her ultimate ability.

Every Warframe team needed to work in tandem to smooth the kinks with the latest frame. Oraxia required new model rigging, animation trees, animation tweaks and complete animation overhauls for how the frame’s legs move and react to the environment around them.

The unique shape of the frame meant collision hitboxes had to be tinkered with, and the player camera needed to be pulled back away from Oraxia because her legs were obscuring the aiming reticle.

There was a cascading series of issues that made the Spider-Frame a tough character to integrate into the game. But seeing the frame in action for the first time validated the team’s decision to commit to it.

«There were just so many things to fix with Oraxia, but the frame ended up being really cool,» Alonso said. «That’s the thing that always catches us: We want to make something cool, and it can be painful getting there, but it’s worth it in the end.»

From foe to friend: Creating a Warframe’s boss fight

Before you get a chance to try out Oraxia for yourself, you’ll have to challenge the sticky seamstress on a newly revealed island in Duviri.

This isn’t the first time players have had to fight another Warframe, of course. Solar rail specters have historically gated every new planet on the Star Chart, and the Stalker’s Warframe acolytes routinely show up to threaten you if you’re bold enough to walk the Steel Path.

Kullervo, one of the other Warframes featured in Duviri, has a boss fight of his own, where you challenge the tortured soul in his gladiatorial arena. But Warframe’s design team has had a lot of practice with boss fights since his debut, learning lessons that will apply in the battle against Oraxia.

«We’re getting better at telegraphing moves and being more careful explaining how things work,» Alonso said. «You know, we have a few bosses within Warframe that — even people that have been playing for years don’t really know how they work. They just know ‘shoot them until it dies’ and they don’t know why. So we want to find where those communication breakdowns are happening and fix those.»

Perhaps more importantly, Alonso explained that traditional boss fights really don’t work in a game like Warframe, so it’s up to the team to find fun new ways to make things challenging, without creating bullet-sponge enemies.

«We’re also trying to have more mechanics rather than just making bosses that essentially soak up damage. When it comes to just avoiding damage or dealing out damage, Warframes are so good at those things that fights become a DPS race,» Alonso said, referring to damage per second. «If it’s just a survivability race, you just subsume Mesmer Skin and stand there — there’s no problem in your life, right? So we’re basically trying to find those spots where there are interesting mechanics.»

Oraxia’s boss fight will include movement mechanics at different intervals, forcing you to avoid hazards in the midst of tangling with your venomous foe.

«In this one, we have some tunnels between boss stages, where you have to dodge some lightning,» Alonso said. «It’s not a complicated thing. It’s not a hard thing. But it’s fun to dodge, jump and slide under it. It adds a different beat of gameplay that feels very Warframe.»

If you’re looking for a model of what the Warframe team believes a good boss fight should feel like, look no further than the Technocyte Coda enemies introduced in Warframe 1999, Alonso said. You might not battle the same infested lich every time, but the stage hazards, like laser lights and explosions, anchor the fight.

«I think that shows a little bit of what we like, which is a bit of combat, then some kind of mechanical component before you’re back in combat again,» he said. «That flows really well, and we’ve found that it has a good rhythm to it.»

The Isleweaver update is available for free now on PlayStation, Xbox and PC. You can dive into the Duviri invasion, help Dominus Thrax retake his throne, and battle Oraxia at her island lair next time you log in to Warframe.