Brussels: At the sprawling logistics terminals that have turned this Walloon city into one of the continent’s busiest gateways for online shopping, a quiet accounting change is about to ripple through every cheap order arriving from outside the bloc. From 1 July the European Union scraps the rule that has let consignments worth up to 150 euros enter free of customs duty, a threshold that retailers from Shenzhen to Istanbul have leaned on to flood European doorsteps with low-cost goods.
In its place the Commission has set a temporary flat charge of three euros, applied per tariff heading inside a shipment rather than per individual package. The levy will run until 1 July 2028, after which ordinary duty rates tied to each product type take over. Guidance and the legal text underpinning the interim fee were published in early June, giving carriers and platforms only weeks to reprogram their declaration systems.
The duty is distinct from a second, more contentious idea still working its way through the institutions: a Union-wide handling fee meant to cover the cost of processing the avalanche of small declarations. The Commission has floated the charge but left both the amount and the start date to be settled in the autumn, a deliberate vagueness that has frustrated logistics operators trying to price contracts for next year.
The numbers behind the reform explain the urgency. The bloc’s customs authorities now wave through billions of low-value parcels a year, the overwhelming majority shipped directly to consumers by a handful of marketplaces. Investigators have repeatedly found that a large share of those goods fail European safety, labelling or chemical rules, leaving compliant domestic sellers undercut by imports that dodge both duty and scrutiny. By forcing every consignment to carry a charge and a fuller declaration, the bloc hopes to claw back revenue and close a loophole that has distorted competition for the better part of a decade.
For shoppers, the immediate effect is modest but real. A single cheap item may rise by a few euros, while bundled orders spread across several product categories could attract the charge more than once. Platforms are weighing whether to absorb the cost, pass it on at checkout, or consolidate shipments to limit the number of tariff headings.
The deeper significance lies in what the interim duty signals. It is a bridge measure pending the far larger overhaul of the customs code, which would create a central EU data hub and shift legal responsibility onto the online marketplaces themselves. Member states agreed last December to bring the duty forward to this summer precisely because the full reform remains years from taking effect. Whether the three-euro charge proves a genuine deterrent or simply a new line on the invoice will depend on how aggressively national authorities police the declarations now landing in terminals like this one.
