The European Union has proposed a two-euro flat fee on billions of small parcels sent directly to people’s homes, which mainly come from China at the moment. They clarify this is not tax but handling charges only. This also means tax will come later.
The fact is that since the pandemic, customer buying habit has been changed and internet buying becomes more and more. Thus bringing tremendous workload for the custom. They need to extend their facilities, storage venues, transportation and recruit more workers. Their cost has greatly increased. Also for commercial habit, goods are no long on the shelf but changed to individual selling through internet and when the amount is smaller can escape from tariff. Thus they have to mend the existing hole. Recently, because of excess production from China, besides workload, there aroused another problem which is safety of goods such as small electric appliances for the EU standard is the strictest in the world and accepted as standard for worldwide safety.
Please refer to this bulletin on 20250502 of French Check and 20250429 on small parcels. This is a new scenario that needed to face even though there is no tariff war. Last year, 4.6 billion such parcels entered the EU, with more than 90% coming from China. When collecting handling fee, they can get an income of 9.2 Euro to improve their facilities and for recruitment of more staff and the workload this year and next year surely will be more than last year. People afraid that after the handling charges, there still will be tariff to add on small parcels.
This is inevitable for sending of goods is no longer by large containers, but dispersed to small parcels. The world is changing everyday and all policies should change with time. Thus concise negotiation is needed to fill the current leakages.