EU's €3 Parcel Duty on Shein, Temu and AliExpress Begins

The bargain that built Shein and Temu in Europe, ordering a five-euro phone case from a warehouse near Guangzhou and paying nothing at the border, quietly expired on Tuesday.

From 1 July, the European Union is levying a flat €3 customs duty on low-value parcels entering the bloc, ending the long-standing exemption that let goods worth under €150 arrive duty-free. The change, agreed by EU finance ministers in December and confirmed by the European Council, is aimed squarely at the Chinese platforms that turned that loophole into a shipping strategy: Shein, Temu and AliExpress.

The scale explains the urgency. China accounted for 91 percent of all low-value e-commerce shipments that entered Europe, according to figures cited by Euronews. Brussels frames the parcels as a triple problem: unfair competition for European retailers who pay duties, safety risks from unregulated goods, and a customs system swamped by billions of packages it cannot realistically inspect.

How the €3 bites depends on what is in the box. Reuters and Euronews report the duty applies per item, sorted by its tariff heading, so a consignment with three different kinds of product would attract three separate charges, while a parcel of several identical dresses or toys is charged once. That reading matters for the way these apps sell: the impulse cart of unrelated cheap goods is exactly the pattern the fee penalises.

The platforms saw it coming. Shein has expanded warehouse space in Wroclaw, in western Poland, and shifted to moving inventory into Europe in bulk rather than mailing each order from China. AliExpress told sellers it would show a "Price includes duties and VAT" label where it applies, and break down import charges before checkout elsewhere. Both moves point the same way, toward local fulfilment that sidesteps the border charge, a quieter change than the headline fee but arguably the more lasting one.

For shoppers, the practical effect is narrow but real. A single-item order sees its price rise by a few euros, enough to erase the margin on the cheapest goods but trivial on a larger buy. The people most exposed are those for whom the ultra-cheap parcel was the point, and the retailers who watched customers drift to platforms that never paid what they did. Europe's own tariff refunds and trade frictions have already reshaped how companies price for the region, a pattern visible in Nike's latest results and in China's export-led factory rebound.

The €3 charge is a stopgap, not the settlement. It holds until a permanent customs regime, meant to apply normal duties by product category, comes into force in 2028, when the bloc's de minimis threshold disappears entirely. What Tuesday really marks is the end of the idea that a parcel could cross a border and owe nothing at all.