The era of the duty-free parcels landing on Europe’s doorstep is over. From July 1, orders worth less than €150 will face a temporary customs charge of €3 as Brussels moves to stem the flood of cheap goods entering the bloc through platforms such as Shein, Temu and AliExpress.
For years, parcels worth less than €150 could enter the EU without customs duties. Last year, the Commission welcomed a political agreement among member states to remove the customs duty relief, calling it a step that would “transform the way e-commerce goods are handled”. To Brussels, such an exemption is “no longer justified” because it creates unfair competition between direct e-commerce imports and traditional retail.
Millions of parcels per day
Seventy per cent of Europeans regularly buy products online. In 2025, 5.8bn low-value parcels entered the EU, roughly 15.9M parcels a day. MEP Dirk Gotink (EPP/NLD), who led the European Parliament’s negotiations on the EU customs reform, described the agreement: “The new rules address the explosive growth of e-commerce: last year, 5.8 billion low value parcels entered the EU.”
The number has been escalating. In 2024, the figure was 4.6bn, doubling the 2023 figure of 2.3bn and more than three times the 1.4bn of 2022. The Council says up to 65 per cent of small parcels entering the EU are undervalued. That means some sellers may be declaring goods below their real value to avoid duties.
Three euros, several categories
The €3 charge is a temporary answer. It will stay in place until the EU Customs Data Hub becomes operational, expected in mid-2028. After that, normal customs duties will apply depending on the type of product. For example, a parcel contains two toys, one woollen coat and three bottles of shampoo. Customs would treat the toys, coat and shampoo as three separate categories, each with a €3 duty. Therefore, the total customs duty would be €9.
Unsafe goods, unfair competition
E-commerce shops like Temu, Shein, and AliExpress are all under pressure from Brussels over illegal products, addictive design, and opaque recommender systems. In May, the Commission fined Temu €200 million, the biggest value so far, under the Digital Services Act.
Brussels said Temu had not done enough to stop illegal products from being sold on its platform. The company called the fine excessive and argued it no longer reflected the safeguards it has in place.
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Shein is facing a formal DSA investigation opened in February 2026, over the sale of illegal products, including content linked to child-like sex dolls, as well as addictive design and the lack of transparency of its recommender systems. AliExpress was under DSA investigation since March 2024 until June 2025, when the Commission accepted its commitments.
The environmental bill
Commission argues the surge in goods shipped directly to consumers has very serious detrimental effects on the climate and the environment. Extremely low retail prices on some products sold online fail to reflect the broader environmental costs linked to the production, the direct shipping, and the complete lifecycle of the product. Besides “such goods are often low-quality, which means they are not energy-efficient, do not last long and cannot be repaired easily”.
The customs threshold made that problem worse. The €150 exemption created an incentive for non-EU companies to split shipments into individual parcels. In practice, that means more packaging, more transport movements and more pressure on already overloaded delivery and customs networks.
