I've spoken with some business owners trying to ship to the US. Every single person you deal with in this process seems to have an Indian accent.
It's like working with an especially incompetent government agency which can "accidently" charge you massive fees because Gunpreet put in the wrong code on entry. This takes 3-6 months to be reimbursed after successfully disputing them.
Now, there's additional fees for contracts allowing for online payments instead of having to call some jeet call center to make payments.
My personal anecdote(s):
Went to send a book to a relative in NJ, from Canada via CPost/USPS. Children's book, my son read it when he was younger, so used. I had to download two apps, one for the "tariff" and the other for some other bureaucratic stuff, meaning if I had to pay the tariffs, I would pay to these apps that would take their cut and pass the rest to the US government. In the meantime, I would have to pay tariffs before sending and then charge the recipient for them.
Someone is making a bundle, when Zion Don announces tariff revenues, be sure that the middleman apps (created to make your life easier) are get a huge cut of that.
Follow the money, you. American tax payer might not feel or see that evidently but you are paying for this and someone in the government and attached companies is swimming in money without doing almost nothing.
Those are basically brokerages, they aren't for ease of use, they're effectively mandatory for most shipments. The bureaucratic app sounds like you needed some type of approval from a government agency which is true and costly for shipping some products.