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The European Union has proposed a new fee on billions of small parcels that are sent directly to people’s homes. This extra two-euro charge would largely affect parcels sent from China on fast-fashion platforms like Shein and Temu.
A new tax has been proposed by the European Union that would stop packages worth less than £126 from being customs-free.
Instead, an additional two-euro charge would be applied to small packages that are sent directly to people’s homes. This would likely affect online marketplaces based in China, which accounted for 90% of all small parcels entering the EU in 2024. For context, that percentage represents 4.6 billion packages.
Fast-fashion platforms such as Shein and Temu offer products at an extremely cheap rate and ship them from China. They’re typically of lower quality but are sent directly from manufacturers, cutting out the need for any intermediaries that typically ramp up price tags.
With such a large volume of goods being sent to Europe, customs staff have seen a significant workload increase, making it more difficult to guarantee the safety and standard of items being checked.
Revenue generated by a new tax would compensate for this extra work, with plans to use any additional funds for the European Union’s overall budget.
Packages sent to customers directly would be hit with the full two-euro fee. Any goods sent to warehouses would be taxed a 75% lower rate at 50 cents.
US president Donald Trump has been applying tariffs on Chinese products for the last few months. There have been worries that many items originally intended to be shipped over to the US would now be dumped in the EU as they’re too expensive for their original destination.
Temu and Shein are problematic for a variety of reasons, too. Last year, the latter was found to be the biggest polluter in the fast fashion industry, with questions around its working standards, quality control processes and environmental footprint frequently raised.
Temu is similarly awful for our planet – all at the sake of lower costs.
Companies based in the EU argue that they cannot compete with the discounted prices that outsourced platforms like Temu and Shein offer. As they export from China, European companies argue that their products don’t have to comply with the EU’s strict product standards in the same way.
Shein and Temu say they do co-operate with regulators and consumer standards, though these claims are largely unchecked. As the BBC reports, both have huge customer bases with a combined size of over 220 million users.
