This isn't enough. The EU is preparing another fee for small packages from China

Cheap shopping from China is going through a second major change within a single year. Starting in July, customs duty will apply to small shipments, and from November, another item will be added to it: a handling fee for the fact that someone at customs even takes care of the parcel. While the first measure is something we all noticed in the cart, this second one doesn’t have a final amount yet. However, it already has an approved legal basis.

Handling fee: What we know so far

At the beginning of September, the EU Council definitively approved a major reform of the customs system. Part of the package is a pan-EU handling fee for small e-commerce shipments, to be introduced no later than 1 November 2026. This is not customs duty in the strict sense. The fee is meant to cover the administrative costs of customs authorities: checking data, risk analysis, and physical inspections of suspicious goods.

The exact amount has not been set yet and will be determined by the European Commission through a separate legal act. At EU level, the discussion is about €2 to €4 per shipment. Meanwhile, the European Textile Association Euratex is pushing for a much higher figure. For so-called “ultra-fast fashion”, it calls for a fee of up to €10. The fee will take effect after the legal text of the reform is published in the Official Journal of the EU.

The three-euro customs duty was just the start

Let’s remind ourselves what already applies. 1 July 2026 marked the end of the exemption that allowed shipments up to €150 to be imported into the EU without customs duty. It was replaced by a temporary flat-rate customs duty of €3. And here’s the detail that surprised many people: you don’t pay once per shipment—you pay for each customs item inside it. If you place an order with three different types of goods, you could end up paying customs duty three times.

This solution, however, is just a stopgap. The flat-rate customs duty is supposed to be in place until 1 July 2028, when it will be replaced by the usual customs tariffs. Until then, a new EU Customs Data Centre is expected to be operational, capable of processing billions of small shipments. The reform also includes the creation of a new EU Customs Authority based in Lille, which is planned to start operating in June 2027.

Numbers from Belgium show just how well it worked

That customs duty isn’t just a minor administrative detail is evident from the first statistics. After the measure was introduced, the Belgian customs authority recorded a 53% drop in customs declarations for shipments up to €150. At the same time, the average declared value per shipment increased significantly—from €5.73 to €10.85. Figures for Slovak media were summarized by the portal Noviny.sk.

Translate into human language: people have stopped ordering little things for a few euros and instead make fewer orders, but bigger ones. The reason is simple: for goods worth three euros, a three-euro customs duty is a 100% price increase, while with orders for forty euros it’s almost unnoticeable. A similar trend is also being reported by France. In both countries, year-on-year the number of orders from outside the EU has dropped by roughly 30 to 45 percent.

Why is the EU doing this

The European Commission’s main argument is volume. In just 2025 alone, almost 5.9 billion items arrived in the European Union in small shipments, and 93% of them came from China. That’s a quantity that can’t realistically be properly checked without someone paying customs officers, systems, and warehouses.

The second argument is safety. In a 2025 inspection, more than half of the products checked in certain categories did not meet EU rules. The third reason is purely economic: European sellers have long argued that they are competing with Asian platforms under unequal conditions, since until recently those platforms were importing without customs duty and with minimal controls.

The platform will pay, not you directly

The reform brings yet another change that may be more important to the average shopper than the amount itself. Under the new rules, large online platforms are considered importers. That means customs formalities and the associated payments will be handled by AliExpress, Temu, or Shein — not by the end customer. This eliminates situations where your parcel gets stuck at customs and you have to add something and pay extra.

But let’s not get carried away. The fee won’t disappear anywhere, it will just move into the product price or shipping cost. The difference is that you’ll see it upfront in the cart, not as an unpleasant surprise on delivery.

The fee does not apply to European warehouses

There’s one way that completely avoids the new rules, entirely legally: European warehouses. If the seller imported the goods to Poland, the Czech Republic, or Germany in bulk and cleared them there through customs, the shipment to you is already moving within the EU. No three-euro customs duty, no handling fee, plus delivery within a few days.

That’s why you can expect Chinese platforms to move an ever larger share of their assortment into European warehouses. From their perspective, it’s simpler and cheaper than clearing millions of tiny parcels individually. For Slovak shoppers, that means something pretty nice: the selection from EU warehouses will likely grow, and the price difference compared to ordering directly from China will shrink. Until that happens, it’s worth combining smaller orders—and for bigger purchases, always check whether the same item might already be available in a Polish warehouse.

And you?

We’d like to know how you’ll react to this. Vote in the poll and write us in the comments whether you’ve already cut back on buying from China.

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