Temu Spending Falls After €3 Duty

There was a time, not long ago, when the trick of Temu and AliExpress was almost childishly simple: send the cheap thing directly from China to the customer's door, keep the parcel below the customs threshold, and let scale do the rest.

The EU has now put a price on that model. In France, spending on Temu fell 32% in value and 50% in volume between June and July, the first month under new customs rules for cheap parcels shipped from outside the bloc. Shein fell too, but less sharply: 16% in value and 15% in volume. The figures come from Joko, a purchase-tracking app monitoring 1.5 million French consumers (Le Figaro). Temu's fall had begun before the duty arrived, so the new charge looks more like an accelerant than the full explanation (E-commerce Nation).

France shows what shoppers did. Customs data from at least six EU countries now shows how the rule changed behaviour on both sides of the transaction.

What the charge actually does

Until 1 July, parcels worth up to €150 sent directly to EU buyers from outside the bloc entered without customs duty. That exemption is gone. The EU now charges €3 for each product category inside a low-value parcel (Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382, HKTDC).

The charge is not per parcel. Five identical T-shirts from one seller count as one category, so the charge is €3. A T-shirt, a phone case and a watch count as three categories, so the charge is €9. This comes on top of VAT, the sales tax that has applied to these imports since the EU closed a separate exemption in 2021 (Ship24, CEC Spain).

That design lands hardest on mixed baskets, which are exactly what Temu and AliExpress are built to encourage: a cable, a kitchen gadget, a phone case, a packet of hair clips. Shein, selling mostly clothes, naturally produces fewer product categories per order. That probably helps explain why its sales held up better, though none of the available data isolates the cause precisely.

Finland's customs data shows how quickly buyers and sellers adjusted. Chargeable item categories inside parcels dropped 66.5% month on month, while actual shipments fell only about 20% (Yrittäjät, Aamuset). People did not simply stop ordering from China. They bundled orders into fewer categories per parcel to reduce the charge. The duty changed the choreography of the purchase as much as the purchase itself.

From parcels to pallets at Liège

The same pattern is visible on the logistics side. At Belgium's Liège Airport, one of Europe's busiest e-commerce cargo hubs, parcel flows fell 41% from June and customs declarations dropped 67% (RTBF, Aviation Business News). Yet total cargo tonnage rose 4% year on year, and shipments valued above €150 grew 10% (Breakbulk News). The goods are still coming. They are just arriving more often in larger consolidated loads rather than as millions of individual doorstep parcels.

The platforms have moved quickly. AliExpress is promoting bundle deals to reduce the number of chargeable categories in an order. Temu and Shein are pushing shoppers towards "EU warehouse" options, which avoid the charge because goods already inside the bloc are not being imported when resold (Business Insider Polska).

For Irish shoppers, the sting may be felt less in the headline duty than in the moment it lands. Where sellers do not collect the charge at checkout, buyers can face the €3-per-category duty at the door, with a separate courier handling fee added on top. That layering of small costs has already prompted complaints in Ireland (Extra.ie).

Who gains, who pays, what's next

The first losers are price-sensitive consumers who relied on cheap mixed-category orders, and the platforms built around that habit. European retailers gain because the old price gap narrows. Belgium reportedly collected €42.5 million in new customs revenue from the charge in July alone, though no official methodology was published (L'Avenir). Lithuanian customs gave the sensible warning: one month is too soon to know whether this is a lasting shift (LRT).

The duty has made the direct small-parcel route visibly more expensive. The harder test now falls to European customs authorities: whether they can stop the same goods being rerouted through EU warehouses, or whether the tariff wall simply becomes another logistics puzzle for the platforms to solve.