I used to manufacture specialized consumer electronics in Shenzhen and sell them worldwide through Etsy. When Britain left the EU I stopped shipping to the UK rather than deal with VAT. I eventually stopped shipping outside the US altogether because shipping and administrative costs ate all the profit. When tariffs on Chinese goods went over 100% in 2024 I packed it in altogether. Bye bye side gig. The demand is still there. Maybe in 10 years I'll pick it up again.

These fees were sucessfully lobbied in the media as a "Temu tax", and even reputable state broadcasters continue to refer to it as a "junk fee". However, it applies indiscriminately to everything from a decades old vintage book purchased from the UK, or spare parts to restore electronics ordered from Japan.

I volunteer with a small US-based non-profit publisher [0], and this all matches my experience. We publish black-and-white technical journals that are worth almost nothing, and our European subscribers have occasionally been charged 20€ per copy by their customs authorities [1].

We're now prepaying the duties, which seems to have solved that problem, but a few months ago our printer informed us that we will now have to pay this additional €3 fee per copy, plus some undisclosed additional markup charged by the shipping intermediary. But at least they'll handle everything for us without any paperwork, so this is just expensive rather than a bureaucratic nightmare.

But unfortunately this fee seems unavoidable for us—we only mail ~300 copies to Europe per issue, so having multiple printing locations is infeasible; I've checked with a few other printers and they all quoted me double what our current printer charges, so it would be way too expensive to print everything in Europe; and timeliness is important for a periodical, so people can't just order in bulk. So it seems like we'll probably just have to raise our subscription rates again to cover these fees.

[0]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/contents.html

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48246014

Fwiw, non us businesses have the same problem trying to ship to the us. It’s how governments want to roll now and how they generate counter actions.

This is not a tariff issue, unbelievably, but one about reducing competition.

I’m not sure I’m following the argument here, because tariffs are all about protectionism, which is a form of reducing external competition

> This is a story of the end of de minimis shipping, which figuratively means “too small to trifle with.”

Didn't the US also end de minimis exceptions recently? Can we really expect other countries and economic zones to keep them if we don't?

The EU closed a tax loophole, and I'm happy to support small local businesses over people shipping things from overseas. I'm sure there are edge cases, but overall I don't see an issue here.

Small businesses in the EU can't ship to the EU.

These new waste charges require administration that put a de facto floor on minimum monthly sales of €300-1500 per-country just to cover PPWR costs. It's insanity.

Small datapoint for me as a non-business entity going the opposite direction. I sell vinyls on Discogs and the last time someone purchased a vinyl from the US I was told I am classed as a business so I had to sign up with some private business which was a customs clearing company. They charged a flat fee and then a daily $1 charge for the entire time the parcel was in flight. I also had to do extremely strict business identity verification, which I obviously couldn't do as an individual.

It's such a mess of a situation.

As someone who buys a lot internationally (because fuck localized media), this has been really annoying. Already had packages that the seller either couldn't ship or which returned all the way around the world. All this ends sup doing is consoldating international commerce even further as eBay and Amazon happily handle this mess for the seller (for a fee and/or cut of the sale price of course).

> VAT: EU member states have varying VAT rates, which surprised me when I learned this a few years ago, particularly for books—some charge 0%, some 40%. For a long time, as a small seller, you could ship DDU (deliver duty unpaid) to an EU customer with the correct price and tariff code declarations, and the customs office or shipper would collect the necessary VAT. Customers didn’t love this, as they’d like to see the final price at checkout, but most understand that the intricacy of VAT (or GST) would overwhelm a small business. Some shippers add agent fees, though, which bumped costs up—sometimes around US$5, sometimes much higher.

It used to be that those packages ended up at a customs depot but I guess it wasn't cost effective for them so they decided to let the shipping companies handle it. Of course they use it as an excuse to extort exhorbitant feeds for a "service" that you never agreed to in the first place and which would be straight up illegal for any other money lender.