The EU changed the rules for selling into Europe.
Here's what happened and what's coming.
If you sell into Europe and you have not looked up from your P&L in the last twelve months, the ground has moved. It moved again. And there is more of it coming before this time next year.
None of it arrived as one big headline. It came in pieces. A customs tweak here, an accessibility deadline there, a product safety rule that most brands only noticed when their listings got pulled. Individually, each one is a footnote. Stacked up, they add up to the biggest change in what it takes to sell into the EU since GDPR.
And that GDPR comparison is the thing to hold onto, because it explains all of it. Every piece of this applies based on where your customer is, not where you are. A brand in Manchester or Austin does not get a pass because it has no office in Frankfurt. If a German shopper can buy from you, the EU considers you in scope. Your postcode is irrelevant. Your customer’s postcode is everything.
Which is a problem, because most brands are already far more international than they ever decided to be. The revenue went global. The operations, mostly, did not. All of the rules below land on exactly that gap.
Here is what has already gone live, what is landing next, and what any UK or US brand actually needs to do about it.
The €3 that eats your margin (live from 1 July 2026)
Start with the one people are actually talking about, because it hits the number that matters.
For years, any parcel worth €150 or less could enter the EU free of customs duty. VAT still applied, but duty did not. That exemption is gone from 1 July 2026. In its place, the EU is charging a flat €3 customs duty on those low-value parcels while it builds the proper system underneath.
Sounds small. It is not, and here is the sting. The €3 is charged per product category, not per parcel. The technical bit is that it lands on each distinct item type in the order. So a parcel with a blouse, a belt and a pair of socks is three different headings, which is €9, not €3. The more varied the basket, the more it stacks.
One thing worth knowing for later: country of origin will also affect the calculation, but not yet. During the interim phase through to July 2028, the €3 flat rate applies regardless of where the product was made. From July 2028, when the EU Customs Data Hub goes live, real tariffs based on HS code and country of origin replace the flat fee. That is when trade agreements and anti-dumping duties come back into play.
For anyone shipping low value, multi item orders direct from outside the EU, that is a real dent.
Then it gets worse before it settles. A separate handling fee of around €2 per parcel is expected from November 2026, which takes the combined charge to roughly €5. The €3 rate itself is temporary. It runs until the EU’s new customs data hub comes online around mid 2028, at which point normal product by product tariffs replace it. So the flat fee is not the destination. It is the holding pattern.
This is not the EU acting alone, either. The US killed its own $800 de minimis threshold in 2025. The UK confirmed in the Autumn Budget 2025 that it is scrapping its £135 threshold too, with reforms landing around 2029. The whole world is closing the small-parcel loophole at once.
What to actually do: work out how many of your EU orders sit under €150 today, because those are the ones that just got more expensive. Get your HS codes right, because sloppy classification now costs you money on every order. And seriously look at holding stock inside the EU. Bulk import once, clear duty once at the border, fulfil locally, and the whole per-parcel problem disappears. This is the point at which international complexity stops being a future problem and starts showing up in this quarter’s margin. The brands that move stock in before July will be selling at a structural discount to the ones absorbing €5 a parcel in August.
The product safety rule that's already pulling listings (live since December 2024)
If the customs change is the one everyone is talking about, the General Product Safety Regulation is the one everyone missed. It has been live since 13 December 2024, and plenty of brands only found out when Amazon or Etsy hid their listings.
The GPSR replaced an old directive and tightened the rules for basically every non-food consumer product sold to EU shoppers. The headline requirement is the one that catches out non-EU brands. You now need an EU-based “responsible person” before your product can be sold. That is a named economic operator inside the EU (or Northern Ireland) who holds your technical documentation and answers to the regulators. It can be an EU importer, a fulfilment provider, or an authorised representative you appoint. But it has to be someone, and it has to be someone inside the bloc.
No responsible person, no market access. Your product listings also have to display the manufacturer’s contact details, the responsible person if the manufacturer is outside the EU, product identifiers, an image, and any safety warnings. The marketplaces are already enforcing this. Non-compliant listings get delisted, and you lose the sales before you understand why.
What to actually do: if you sell physical goods into the EU and you have not appointed a responsible person, that is the single most urgent line on this whole list, because you may already be non-compliant. Fix the responsible person, then fix your listing data.
The accessibility deadline that went live in June 2025
The European Accessibility Act switched on for enforcement on 28 June 2025, and it is aimed squarely at your website.
If you run an ecommerce service for EU consumers, your site and app have to be accessible to people with disabilities. In practice, that means meeting the WCAG 2.1 AA standard across the whole shopping journey, and it is all of the criteria, not the convenient ones. Screen readers have to announce your variant pickers. Keyboard users have to get through your checkout. Price changes have to be read out when someone changes an option. The places sites usually break are the fancy bits, the carousels, the multi-step checkouts and the dynamic carts.
There is a carve out for genuine microenterprises, under ten staff and under €2m turnover. Almost nobody reading this qualifies. Existing systems get some breathing room until June 2030, but new work is expected to be accessible now, and you are supposed to publish an accessibility statement either way.
This is not theoretical. French disability groups filed formal notices against major retailers within days of the deadline and took several to court by late 2025. Regulators in the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and others are actively surveilling. Penalties vary by country and run into the millions in the worst cases.
What to actually do: get someone to run your full purchase flow with a screen reader and see where they get stuck. That one exercise tells you 80% of what you need to fix. Then publish an accessibility statement. It is also, for what it is worth, just good commerce. There are tens of millions of EU shoppers with disabilities, and an inaccessible checkout is an abandoned cart with a legal risk attached.
The AI rules, and the part that actually applies to you (landing August 2026)
The EU AI Act has been phasing in since 2024, and most of the coverage misses the point for ecommerce brands, because most of the scary stuff is about high-risk systems like credit scoring and biometrics that you probably do not run.
The bit that lands on marketing and ecommerce teams is the transparency rule, and it applies from 2 August 2026. In plain terms, when a customer is talking to a bot, you have to make it obvious it is a bot. When content is AI-generated, including synthetic images and deepfakes, it has to be labelled. If you have leaned into AI chat support, AI product recommenders, or AI-generated creative and imagery, those are the touchpoints in scope. Worth knowing, given how many operators are figuring out AI on their own, that “we’ll sort the compliance bit later” is a common and risky default here.
One caveat worth knowing. The EU has a simplification package in flight (the so called Digital Omnibus) that reached political agreement in May 2026 and may shift some of the high-risk timelines. The transparency obligations are the part that matters for most brands, and those are the ones to plan around. The Act also reaches beyond the EU’s borders, same as everything else here, and the fines are the largest of any of these rules, up to €35m or 7% of global turnover at the top end.
What to actually do: audit where AI touches your customer. Label your bots. Label your synthetic content. It is not a heavy lift, but it is the kind of thing that is embarrassing to be caught not doing.
Packaging, and the death of the oversized box (from August 2026)
Last one. The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation applies from 12 August 2026, and it changes how you can ship.
The rule ecommerce teams will feel first is the empty-space limit. Void in a parcel cannot exceed 40%. The era of a lipstick in a shoebox full of air pillows is over, because that air now counts against you. There are also recycled-content requirements, restrictions on nasty substances in packaging, and, for non-EU sellers, a requirement to appoint an authorised representative to handle it. Digital labelling on packaging follows from 2027.
What to actually do: right-size your parcels and talk to your packaging supplier about recycled content and documentation. The unboxing flex has a compliance cost now.
Digital product passports, coming for your labels (from 2027)
This one is further out but worth flagging now, because the lead time to comply is long.
The EU is building towards a system where products carry a Digital Product Passport, a QR code or similar that links to verified information about materials, carbon footprint, repairability and where the thing came from. The first mandatory version is the battery passport, live from 18 February 2027 for larger batteries. Textiles and apparel are next in the queue, with the rules expected to be adopted around 2027 and compliance landing roughly eighteen months after that, so realistically late 2028 into 2029. Furniture, electronics and others follow.
There is no single deadline. It rolls out category by category. But if you sell textiles, footwear, electronics or furniture into the EU, the passport is coming for your product data, and gathering that data across a messy supply chain is exactly the kind of job you cannot start the week before it is due.
The pattern, and the point
Read all of that back, and you notice it is the same move, over and over. Your parcel, your website, your product, your packaging, your bot. Each one is now something the EU will regulate regardless of where you sit, on the single condition that a European can buy from you.
That is the mental shift. Selling into Europe used to be a shipping question. It is now a compliance question, and the truth is that the barrier to entry just went up. Which, if you look at it from the right angle, is not entirely bad news for the brands that get organised. Every one of these rules is a hurdle. Every hurdle thins the field. The cheap, non-compliant, drop-shipped competition that used to undercut you on price is exactly what most of this is designed to squeeze out.
So the brands that treat this as a checklist and get it done are not just avoiding fines. They are slowly pulling away from everyone who is still hoping none of it applies to them. That is usually how era changes actually play out: the shift looks like admin right up until it looks like a gap nobody can close.
It applies. Get the map, and start walking.