If you sell physical products and ship them from China, you have probably noticed your delivery times drifting over the last year. Orders that used to land in nine days now take fourteen. A few sit somewhere invisible for a week and then move again with no explanation. Customers start asking. You start wondering whether your supplier got lazy.
Your supplier probably didn’t get lazy. Two borders changed the rules underneath everyone, and almost nobody told the people it affects most.
What changed in the US
The United States used to let shipments valued under $800 enter duty-free with minimal processing. That was the de minimis exemption, and the entire “ship each order individually from China” model was built on it.
It’s gone. It ended for China and Hong Kong in May 2025, and for the rest of the world on 29 August 2025.
What replaced it is ordinary import treatment. Every parcel now needs a real commercial invoice, an accurate description, a correct HS classification, and duty paid on entry. Your landed cost now includes import duty, a customs entry fee, and broker handling — three line items that used to be zero.
What changed in the EU
The EU ran a similar exemption: parcels under €150 came in free of customs duty. The Council gave that its final green light to abolish on 11 February 2026, and on 1 July 2026 it was replaced with a flat charge.
The flat charge is €3 — and here is the part that catches people — €3 per tariff category, not per parcel.
If a customer buys four unrelated items and you ship them together, that can be four separate €3 charges on one box. If you sell bundles or gift sets, the composition of the set is now a pricing decision, not a packing detail. A set built inside one HS family costs €3. The same set spanning four families costs €12, on every single order, forever.
This flat rate is an interim measure running to 1 July 2028, at which point the EU’s customs data hub is expected to take over and normal tariff rates apply. So the €3 is not the end state. It is the cheap phase.
Why your parcels are actually sitting still
Here is the mechanism, and it is more boring than most people expect.
The most common reason a small parcel gets held at customs is not fraud, not volume, not politics. It is a vague product description or a wrong HS code.
“Merchandise.” “Gift.” “Sample.” A blank value field. These used to sail through under de minimis because nobody was assessing duty, so nobody was checking. Now every parcel is an entry that has to be classified and assessed, and a description that doesn’t say what the thing is stops the line.
Wrong codes are worse than vague ones, because a wrong code produces a confident wrong answer that then has to be unwound.
This is worth sitting with, because it explains the thing that confuses everyone: the delay is not evenly distributed. Some of your parcels are fine and some vanish for two weeks. That’s not a supplier being inconsistent. That’s the difference between a parcel that was documented properly and one that wasn’t.
Why switching suppliers won’t fix it
This is the part I want to be most direct about, because it is where I see people waste months.
The obvious move, when deliveries slow down, is to go find a better supplier. Research a few agents, compare shipping times on their landing pages, migrate.
But the slowdown isn’t a supplier-quality problem. It’s structural. Per-order direct shipping from China got slower for everyone — every agent, every fulfilment platform, every seller — the moment those two exemptions disappeared. A new agent inherits exactly the same border.
You can move suppliers and land in precisely the same place, three months later.
The work didn’t disappear. It moved upstream, into three things that happen before the parcel ever leaves:
Classification. Every product needs an HS code that is actually correct, chosen deliberately rather than guessed by whoever fills the form. This is now a recurring cost driver, not paperwork.
Documentation. Real commercial invoices. Descriptions that say what the object is, in words a customs officer can match to a code. Declared values that match what the customer paid.
Consolidation. If per-parcel entry now carries a fixed cost, then the number of entries is a cost you control. Batching, holding, and shipping consolidated turns forty entry fees into one. The “ship every order the moment it comes in” reflex is now, in a lot of cases, the expensive option.
What good looks like now
I run a cross-border store myself — uggaz.com, out of China, shipping worldwide on my own account — so this isn’t theory I read about.
One data point from my own orders: a parcel to Germany landed at 19:05 and was released at 21:05. Two hours, no hold, no query. Not because I have a special relationship with anyone, but because the declaration named the product properly, carried the right code on the right line, and matched the sale price.
That is the whole trick. It is unglamorous and it is most of the game.
A few things that follow from it:
- Write descriptions for a stranger. The person reading it has thirty seconds and no context. “Cotton canvas backpack, embroidered” beats “bag” beats “merchandise.”
- Split declarations by product and code, not by quantity. One line per HS code, with the code on it. If you leave the code blank, someone downstream guesses — and their guess is not optimised for you.
- Declare honestly and consistently. Your declared value should match your sale price. Under-declaring to save duty is also under-insuring: loss compensation is paid against declared value.
- Design bundles inside one HS family. In the EU that is now worth €3 per extra family, per order.
- Count your entries, not just your shipping rate. The per-entry fixed costs are often the bigger number now.
One thing I don’t know
I don’t know how long the €3 interim regime holds, or exactly what replaces it in 2028. Anyone who tells you confidently is guessing. Plan for the transition to be real and to arrive on schedule, and don’t build a margin structure that only works at €3.
And for anything touching your actual tax position — registration, VAT liability, what your company structure means in a given market — talk to a qualified advisor in that jurisdiction. I can tell you how the border behaves. I can’t tell you what your accountant should file.
I’m Gobby Yan. I have been producing commercials in Shanghai since 2007. I now run a cross-border store from China, plus do this work for other independent DTC brands — sourcing, samples, product photography, packaging and customs. If something on your side is currently stuck, I’m happy to look at it.