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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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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah getting little electronic thingies has become way too expensive to make sense anymore. Little microcontrollers and such that could be had for a couple € are now twice as expensive for no good reason. And 99% of things like that were never available from EU stores anyway.
I agree with stopping toxic toys and clothes and tat being mass purchased needs to stop. But this blanket tarifff is just annoying.
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.