From 1 July 2026, a temporary €3 customs duty applies per item on qualifying consignments worth up to €150 coming into the EU from outside it. The Commission says the change is about the huge rise in low-value e-commerce, product compliance and putting direct imports on a fairer footing with goods brought in through normal bulk-import routes.
The extra cost lands where the margin is thin
On a cheap product, a few euros matters. Customers only see the total and decide whether it is still worth buying. If it is not, the sale simply disappears.
It is just how the maths works at the cheaper end. There is less room to absorb another charge because the selling price is already paying for materials, packaging, payment fees, tax, equipment and the ordinary mistakes and losses that come with trading.
Say the printer packs in and the replacement is £800. You look at the orders coming in, work out whether the repayment is manageable and take finance because the business needs the printer to carry on. That is a perfectly normal business decision.
What you cannot do later is go back and rerun that decision using a different set of trading conditions. If overseas customers start seeing a higher final price and some of those orders stop coming in, the loan does not care. If one market becomes too awkward or too expensive to serve, the repayment still does not care. The income can move very quickly; the fixed commitment does not.
"Just adapt" costs money as well
Large businesses have options that a small business simply does not. Stock can be imported in bulk, held inside the EU, moved through fulfilment centres and dealt with by people whose job is customs. A small seller getting the odd order from France or Germany is not going to send a pallet of greeting cards to a warehouse first. They are going to put the order in the post.
The same rule can land very differently depending on the size of the business. Telling a small firm to adapt is easy enough. Moving stock, changing fulfilment, paying for more compliance or carrying extra working capital all cost money. If the point of the problem is that sales have already dropped, that is not a small detail.
What was actually assessed?
The Commission's 2023 customs impact assessment says the reform was not expected to have adverse effects on SMEs and says simpler customs processes should benefit smaller firms.
That is the bit I think is worth asking about. The narrower question is whether the effect on very small overseas sellers with existing fixed commitments was actually modelled when low-value trade became more expensive.
For a big retailer, a rule change can become another project. For a tiny business, it can be the difference between a repayment that was comfortable and one that suddenly starts taking too much out of the account. That is a much more ordinary problem than customs reform sounds on paper, and it is the part small business owners are likely to notice first.