EU Adds €3 To Cheap Imports

A phone cable, a T-shirt and a toy ordered from Temu used to reach Malta, like the rest of the EU, without customs duty. From 1 July 2026, that kind of mixed basket can be charged more than once: €3 on the clothing item, €3 on the electronics item, and so on. The charge follows the product category, not the parcel (Swedish Customs, Business Insider Polska). On a €10 impulse buy, the calculation changes quickly.

The measure is aimed at around 5.9 billion low-value consignments entering the EU each year, more than 90% of them from China (Der Spiegel, Reuters). It is a temporary regulation and expires in July 2028 (EUR-Lex). But the platforms it was designed to discipline are already adjusting, and the adjustment may leave the biggest ones stronger.

What the loophole actually was

The loophole was more specific than the political shorthand suggests. Under existing EU rules, goods worth under €150 could enter without customs duty, the tax charged at the border on imported products. They were not exempt from VAT. That gap was closed in 2021, when the EU made platforms collect value-added tax at checkout on all commercial imports through IOSS, the Import One-Stop Shop (Council of the EU, EUR-Lex).

The new €3 charge therefore closes the remaining gap: the customs-duty exemption. A shop in Ħamrun, Mosta or Il-Belt never had access to that duty-free channel. German customs described the reform directly as a correction of this competitive distortion (Generalzolldirektion).

Per category, not per parcel

The detail that will matter for consumers is how the charge accumulates. German, Swedish and Polish customs guidance all say it is levied by product category, meaning by tariff heading, the customs classification code used to identify a product, rather than simply per shipment (Swedish Customs). A basket with clothing, electronics and a toy triggers three separate charges. Cheap mixed orders become visibly less cheap.

Who pays in law depends on the customs paperwork. Polish reporting says the legal burden can fall on the declarant, the party filing the customs form, often a logistics company or the platform itself. For shoppers in Malta, the practical question is simpler: whether Temu, Shein and similar platforms absorb the cost or show it at checkout (Polsat News). There is no post-implementation pricing data yet.

The warehouse workaround

The adaptation already under way may matter more than the fee. The €3 charge applies to low-value consignments sent from outside the EU directly to a consumer. Goods imported in bulk into an EU warehouse and then dispatched domestically follow a different customs route: the final consumer parcel is no longer treated as a third-country import subject to the per-category levy (Rzeczpospolita, Polsat News). The bulk shipment still faces normal customs duties when it enters the EU, but the parcel-by-parcel friction and the category stacking disappear before the item reaches the buyer.

That draws a clear line between winners and losers. EU warehouse operators, fulfilment firms and European e-commerce competitors gain. Allegro’s spokesman told Business Insider Polska the measure helps level competition across Europe (Business Insider Polska). Price-sensitive consumers buying cheap mixed baskets lose. So do small non-EU sellers that cannot afford the stock, leases and compliance costs of EU warehousing. The largest Chinese platforms can.

That is the awkward part for a country such as Malta, where small retailers already compete with global platforms while facing higher freight and limited scale. Temu and Shein have the logistics network and capital to shift stock into European warehouses. A small seller in Shenzhen listing ten products does not. A border fee designed to reduce the platforms’ cost advantage can become a scale advantage, creating another barrier that suits the largest operators best.

What remains uncertain

The EU has changed the cost structure of cheap cross-border e-commerce. Whether it changes behaviour depends on evidence that does not yet exist: parcel volumes after July, platform pricing at checkout, and whether bulk imports into warehouses are inspected more rigorously than millions of individual parcels were. A separate handling fee is expected later this year, but the amount has not been decided (Reuters, Tagesschau).

Closing a customs loophole can make competition fairer. It can also accelerate the move towards EU-based warehousing by the same platforms the EU is trying to contain. For consumers in Malta, the first visible test will be the checkout price.