- cross-posted to:
- world@quokk.au
- cross-posted to:
- world@quokk.au
Sales on Shein, Temu, and AliExpress have fallen sharply in Germany, while customs authorities across Europe report fewer small shipments. The early results suggest the charge is changing trade, although European retailers have yet to see clear benefits.
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In Germany, combined sales on Shein, Temu, and AliExpress dropped by 35.5 per cent year on year to €566m in the third quarter, according to e-commerce association BEVH. Their combined share of German online retail fell from 5.3 per cent in the second quarter to 3.1 per cent. The consumer survey measures spending, providing evidence of falling purchases beyond changes in customs declarations.
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Italy recorded a 39 per cent decline in low-value parcel imports in July–August compared with May–June, according to figures from Customs Agency Director Roberto Alesse cited in an Italian parliamentary research dossier.
In Poland, Finance Ministry figures supplied to PAP showed customs declarations falling from 4.24m in June to 2.11m in July, a monthly decline of 50.1 per cent.
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The pattern extends elsewhere. Belgian authorities reported 53 per cent fewer low-value declarations in July than a year earlier. Czech customs figures reported by ČTK showed declared items falling by 81 per cent between June and September, from 13.6m to 2.6m. The figures cover different periods and counting methods, so they illustrate the scale of the adjustment rather than a ranking of declining demand.
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The duty is also changing how goods reach customers. Dutch Customs reported a 46 per cent fall in average e-commerce declarations in its initial July–August comparison with the first-half average, while standard declarations rose by 20 per cent. Its August figures were provisional and covered only the period to 25 August. Retailers appeared to be importing more goods in bulk and storing them in European warehouses before dispatching orders to consumers.
That shift can help customs authorities inspect imports. Dutch Customs Director-General Nannette van Schelven said fewer individual parcels were arriving directly for consumers, “making it easier for us to check whether products are safe”.
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Product safety remains a concern: as EU Perspectives reported, the Commission has accepted Temu’s plan to strengthen safeguards after tests exposed unsafe toys and chargers on its platform.
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Tariffs alone are not enough
BEVH attributed the pressure on low-margin Asian products to higher import charges. However, weakening confidence and rising energy costs also weighed on spending, while domestic retailers had not benefited from their competitors’ decline. “Tariffs alone are not enough,” BEVH chief executive Alien Mulyk said, calling for stronger market surveillance and enforcement.
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I think it’s good. The flood of cheap manufactured items was too great for customs to handle. They couldn’t check every little package and so children’s toys with poisonous traces and all kinds of stuff bad for your health made it thru.
OTOH, it has made it hideously expensive to order things like small parts for tinkerers and DIYers, for example. Also, Amazon now does the logistics for many of these, so the EU is essentially giving Amazon much of that trade.
And now they still make it through, but the customs get paid additional money (which is the only real motivation behind the change).
I disagree. Those items are still being manufactured and will still be imported into the EU. Nobody in China is closing their factory, they are searching for other ways to get those items to customers in the EU. And if you have been paying attention: I’ve seen those cheap chinese chargers and electronics in retail stores. In those 1€ stores. At flea markets. Ebay is full of local dropshipping companies. This will just make everything more expensive.
(and it sucks that companies can outsource their production to cheaper countries while the government is preventing the people from outsourcing their buying to cheaper countries, too)
Fuck this so much, it was made by a bunch of EU burocrats that never fixed 1 thing in their life. Now instead of giving money to the Chinese I give to Amazon; great fucking improvement guys, well done, your salaries and allowances to live in luxury in Brussels are really paying off.
Now instead of giving money to the Chinese I give to Amazon.
You are free to go to the local shops or any European alternative. It’s up to you.
There are no local shops where I live, European alternatives for small electronics components don’t exist without massive shipping costs. Those are nice idealistic things to say but they don’t translate to reality.
There is a big drawback here - getting spare parts for repair (of electronics) or electronics in general is now much more expensive. Or other stuff you can’t find in Europe.
They don’t care, these rules were lobbied for by businesses who import all their products from China and resell them.
They don’t care, these rules were lobbied for by businesses who import all their products from China and resell them.
This is not even possible. Chinese platform like Shein or Temu exploit their own exclusive supply chains. Also, the transparency and safety rules in Europe wouldn’t make it impossible for the companies to hire these Chinese sweatshops.
There are many reports on that, e.g.,
The truth behind your $12 dress: Inside the Chinese factories fuelling Shein’s success
… The beating heart of this empire is a workforce sitting behind sewing machines for around 75 hours a week in contravention of Chinese labour laws. These hours are not unusual in Guangzhou, an industrial hub for rural workers in search of a higher income; or in China, which has long been the world’s unrivalled factory.
But they add to a growing list of questions about Shein, once a little-known Chinese-founded company that has become a global behemoth in just over five years …
Its meteoric rise … has been dogged with controversy about its treatment of workers and allegations of forced labour. Last year [2024] Shein admitted to finding children working in its factories in China …
Another piece finds that fast fashion “deals” and forced labor of Uyghur Chinese as it says,
… When you buy something at an impossibly low price, remember that it is impossibly low for a reason. That reason is exploitation and enslavement. That $5 Temu turtleneck I bought last month was $5 because when labor is forced, prices can undercut any legitimate competitor. The Walk Free Foundation’s Global Slavery Index estimated in 2023 that 27.6 million people are in forced labor worldwide, with China ranked among the highest for government-imposed forced labor …
There are many reports on this exploitative system, and they all come to a similar conclusion …
What IS an impossibly low price, however? I honestly can’t tell what the price of something mass manufactured should be, between the exploitation of workers and the price gouging of capitalism. If a simple doodad costs $1, is that fair? How much is the material cost? How many thousands or millions of that doodad can a machine churn out per hour? The average consumer (including me) really has no basis for comparison nowadays.
I honestly can’t tell
Indeed. It takes a lot to learn what the minimum costs would be, especially since the destruction of environment is not really priced in.
It’s indeed hard to tell what a ‘fair’ price is and what it means. But supply chain transparency is one important thing in my opinion. We have the technology and the tools to make this possible. What we lack is a common effort across the globe and the political will to introduce such transparent systems.
Although determining a fair price might always be subject to individual views to some (high?) degree, we would easily consent that exploitative production systems like China’s are unacceptable. These is why transparency is so important in my opinion.
Europe and a few like-minded states have made some important steps in this direction in recent years, but large producers like the U.S. and China are not only behind in this but refuse to comply with global rules. They have been lobbying heavily against them.
As I understand it, it’s the crazy load on customs it tries to alleviate. They don’t care if the same stuffs arrives in bulk to warehouses in Europe, these can reasonably be checked.
When the issue is the load on customs, why not true to fix that? (More capacity, more automation, … there are multiple possibilities)
In 2025 average cost of delivering a parcel from China from the border to your home was between 7 and 12 Euro.
This is fuel, labor, storage. Automation does not really cut it. Drop off lockers do cut that cost, but very few postal services have that infrastructure.
But this is delivery cost and per parcel. Not a customs problem. And does not explain the fee per item.
these can reasonably be checked
They aren’t. They rely on self-reporting from the big importers and logistics companies. Customs agencies around Europe lack the manpower to check everything regardless if it’s small parcels or bulk imports.
Absolutely.
We have to rely on some good resellers, of which there are few.
Tinytronics.nl is my go to for central Europe. Not that much markup, fast shipping, good service. Of course their stock is limited compared to the vastness of aliexpress.
For components, RS and TME are the only sellers that sell to individuals in the EU and their stock is miniscule, especially for MCUs. You can barely find any stock from EU MCU suppliers. You literally can’t find ublox Nordic chips in the EU as an individual. You can’t find raw Nordic chips where you have to design your own antenna that were released in the past 7 years in the EU.
It is honestly scandalous how shitty the EU electronics distributing market is for products that are literally made in the EU.
Fair. The duties are certainly not enough, and European industries will have to react. The transition will take time, but the continent will be better off in my opinion in the long run if and when we have higher degrees of independence from states like China and the U.S., even though we may pay more for some stuff.
I agree that sucks, but what other option is there? China floods the European market with cheap, low quality garbage that is often even dangerous. If there is demand for spare parts a EU company should fill the gap, even if they just bulk buy the same stuff off aliexpress you used to, still better for the environment.
I get the protectionism against lousy work conditions, lousy wages and lousy quality of some of the items. But still, who do we protect when there are no equivalents in western markets? Who will build & sell me a battery or a display of a years old phone - there will be no huge demand? But yes, you have a good point about environmental aspect, though, TBH is there that big of a difference between the two approaches?
The other option is to just keep things as they are since that worked for decades. It’s not like you improve anything by just changing who sells in demand Chinese imported products or where they ship from and artificially raising the prices for anything else.
Good on EU to counter this shit. Colonialism never changed: dictatorships with questionable moral values seeing themselves as superior and destroying established nations. Its high time for the EU to recognize that colonialism of the 21st century is a powergrab by subpar, totalitarian, dictatorships.
China is pathetic. Largest economy of the world, yet their impoverished populace doesnt have kids and no way of building wealth.
This is my personal inflation nightmare. Everything is suddenly getting expensive as fuck. Those cheap cables. Those replacement parts. Electronic parts. Some of those are not available from EU sellers. Or just by some shady small LLC or UG dropshipping company which is also not doing anything. Fuck this.
Is AOL delivering packages in Europe now?
I’m not surprised to hear that this isn’t translating to increased sales in the EU.
I think a lot of the appeal is the low price which enables recreation or impulse shopping. It doesn’t matter if the product isn’t great, it’s disposable at those prices. Once it starts creeping up, people start to feel ripped off. Importers add cost, plus products purchased locally have local taxes.
I like to think I avoid recreational shopping, but even in my irl shopping for “wants” there is a point where I will simply go without that product if the price seems too high for what I’m getting.
I think the enshittification problem is partially to blame. For example, I’d like to buy (womens) clothes that last more than a year. But these days you can’t even rely on buying more expensive items to get higher quality, you have to become a fucking fabric detective to find anything that lasts. So I understand the urge to say fuck it, it’s going to disintegrate anyway, so might as well buy the cheapest items every couple of months so I’m not bleeding money replacing clothes.
Worth mentioning that cheap (clothing and other) items tend to be laced with harmful substances to a degree that would get people thrown in prison were they manufactured that way in Europe. In some cases, upper limits for dangerous substances are exceeded by thousands of times.
Fabric detective! What a great term. Yeah, it’s challenging. I find some luck with thrift shops but I don’t have a dress code I need to follow, really.
Shouldn’t the headline be the other way around? As in the cause is EU duties so it should come second.
Tariffs being economic suicide on the part of the USA when Trump enacts them are for your safety™ when it’s the EU doing it. It’s never been about safety, the overwhelming majority of recalls are done because of self checks, customs will only ever stop a tiny fraction of all unsafe or otherwise illegal products even if they’re given massive budgets.
Buying tea from outside the EU is now prohibitively expensive at 5€ extra per HS code for “small” orders (150€ worth of sencha is a hefty parcel). I already started doing very big orders to avoid the 3€ tax and customs have fought back by making me pay 3€ on items without tax (0% times item value is 3€ according to them), the next time I need tea I’ll have to resort to smuggling or fraudulent customs declarations (there’s several HS codes for different teas, using just one for all kinds is technically fraud, but very very difficult to see or prove).
It’s going to make tea prices way worse, we’re already at around 300% of native region prices…
