EU's €3 Import Duty: Landed Cost for Shopify Sellers

For years, a parcel worth under €150 could enter the EU duty-free. As of 1 July 2026, that is over. A new, temporary €3 customs duty now applies to low-value parcels shipped into the EU from outside it — and if you sell into Europe from the US, the UK, or Asia, it lands directly on your landed cost. This guide is the practical version: what changed, whether it touches your store, exactly what it costs your margin (on a small two-line parcel it can run about 12% of the order), and how to set Shopify up so the €3 doesn't quietly eat your profit.

What Changed on July 1, 2026

The core change is simple to state. Under Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382, the EU eliminated the €150 customs-duty relief that let low-value imports enter duty-free, and replaced it with a flat €3 customs duty per item in consignments whose value does not exceed €150. The stated reason is fairness: the exemption was seen as tilting the field toward direct low-value imports over traditional retail, which pays duty on bulk shipments.

The €150 exemption is gone

The €3 is a fixed amount, not a percentage of value — so there is no ad valorem calculation to run on each line, and no need to establish a customs value to work out the duty itself. The parcel's intrinsic value still matters, though: it is what decides whether a consignment falls under the €150 ceiling where the flat duty applies at all.

It runs as a temporary measure from 1 July 2026 until 1 July 2028. After that, the special €150 regime disappears entirely and normal ad valorem HS duty rates apply to distance-sale goods regardless of their value. Here is the full timeline, so you can see what has already landed and what is still ahead.

What did not change: VAT and the €150 value threshold

Two things are easy to confuse here. First, VAT has not changed: import VAT was already collected on parcels up to €150, and it still is — the €3 is charged in addition to VAT and any national handling fees. Second, the €150 figure itself still matters, but now as the ceiling for the €3 regime, not a duty-free line. The existing VAT schemes — the Import One-Stop Shop (IOSS), Special Arrangements, and the standard procedure — are not changed by the €3 duty, so how you already declare and collect VAT stays the same.

What's still ahead: the handling fee and PIDs

Two related measures are on the horizon, and one of them firmed up in September. The separate handling fee is now law: the reform became Regulation (EU) 2026/2108, signed on 16 September 2026 and published in the Official Journal on 19 September 2026. The regulation charges it per item — goods sharing the same tariff classification and description (and origin, where declared), the same unit the €3 duty counts — on goods sold in distance sales, and unlike the €3 duty it does not limit the fee to consignments up to €150.

On 21 September 2026 the Commission adopted a delegated regulation setting the fee at €2 per item; it can enter into force only if neither the Parliament nor the Council objects within 30 days, and it applies from the tenth day after its publication in the Official Journal. The Commission says the EU will apply the €2 fee from 1 November 2026, though the regulation itself ties the start to that delegated act rather than to a fixed date. It is owed by whoever owes the customs debt — the importer or declarant — not by your customer.

A second review sits closer than the 2028 end date. From 1 October 2026 and every month after, the Commission must assess whether trade flows are being diverted and, where appropriate, propose extending the €3 duty to cover all goods in a consignment up to €150 — not only those sold at a distance. That is an obligation to assess, producing at most a proposal, so it is a watch item rather than something to plan around.

More concrete are Product Identifiers (PIDs), which become mandatory on 1 November 2026 (voluntary until then, with no penalty). They require standardized identifiers — a merchant identifier and manufacturer identifiers, plus an exception code where none exists — so product data flows accurately from seller to customs declarant. The practical effect: a generic product description will no longer be enough.

Does This Affect Your Store?

Before the math, settle the simplest question: does this even touch you? The duty targets distance sales into the EU — goods dispatched by or on behalf of a seller from a third country to a consumer in an EU member state. Find your row below.

One narrow exception sits inside that scope, and it is the one worth checking if you ship from the UK. The Commission excludes goods benefiting from preferential trade agreements or Customs Union measures — as long as the VAT has not been collected using IOSS and they are declared in H1. All three conditions have to hold together, the test is on the goods rather than on the seller, and if you do use IOSS the €3 applies regardless. Whether a given product qualifies for preferential origin is a question for your customs agent, not a setting in Shopify.

A regime worth separating from this one while you are here: packaging EPR. Every EU country runs its own extended-producer-responsibility scheme for the box and filler you ship in, and the duty to register with it is older than this customs reform, unrelated to the €150 ceiling and triggered in Germany by the very first parcel. Nothing about the €3 duty changes it, and the EU's packaging regulation (PPWR) added a design layer on 12 August 2026 — the whole picture is in our EU packaging EPR and PPWR guide.

Product safety is a third separate track: GPSR has applied since December 2024, and our GPSR guide for non-EU sellers covers the EU responsible person it asks for.

Where IOSS fits in

The Import One-Stop Shop (IOSS) is a VAT scheme, and whether you need a number of your own is a decision with its own routes and its own price — we work it through in our guide to whether your store needs an IOSS number. Whether the import scheme or the Union OSS is the one you need turns on where the stock sits — IOSS vs OSS for a Shopify store settles that.

What belongs here is the boundary: the €3 duty does not change how IOSS works — the VAT schemes are untouched — but it does sit alongside it: the IOSS holder is first in the chain of parties that can declare the goods. In short, whichever VAT route you use, the €3 duty applies the same way; it is a duty question, not a VAT one.

The €3-Per-Tariff-Line Math

This is the part most guides get wrong, so it is worth being precise. The regulation charges €3 per “item,” but “item” is a legal term, not a physical one.

Why an “item” means a tariff line, not a unit

In EU customs law, an item is one or more goods sharing the same tariff classification, description, and origin. Because of the way the IT systems work, the €3 applies per declaration line, irrespective of the quantity in that line.

So five identical T-shirts under one HS code are a single €3 line — the quantity is free. But a T-shirt and a watch are two different classifications, so they are two lines, or €6. The lever that moves your cost is the number of distinct categories, not the number of units.

Worked examples: €3, €6, €12

The official worked examples make the rule concrete. Here is how the same €3 stacks up across typical parcels, including Shopify's own illustration of a mixed cart.

The canonical case to carry through the rest of this guide is the middle one: a €50 order with two tariff lines attracts €6 in new duty — 12% of the order's value. Hold onto that number; the calculator opens on it, and the chart puts it in context.

Your €3 Duty Margin Impact

Numbers on a page are someone else's store. Use the calculator below to price your order value, your typical number of tariff lines, your current margin, and the share of your orders that ship into the EU. It shows the duty per order, what it does to margin if you absorb it, and what a full pass-through would add to your checkout price. It prices the €3 duty alone: the separate €2 handling fee, once in force, comes on top — see what's still ahead.

Absorb It or Pass It On?

Once you know the number, the decision is whether it comes out of your margin or your customer's wallet. The key insight is that a flat fee is regressive: €3 is a painful slice of a €20 order but a rounding error on a €150 one. The chart below shows how the burden falls as order value rises — and how a multi-category parcel, with more tariff lines, multiplies it.

That shape points to a clear strategy. On higher-value orders, absorbing the €3 barely moves your margin — the calculator will show a fraction of a point. On small or multi-category parcels, it is worth passing through or nudging your average order value up (free shipping thresholds, bundles) so the flat fee is a smaller share. What you cannot do is engineer the fee away, and it is honest to say so.

The anti-grouping trap

DDP or DDU: Who Gets the Customs Surprise

The €3 has to be paid by someone, somewhere — and the incoterm you choose decides where the customer meets it. There are two routes: Delivered Duty Paid (DDP), where you collect duties and taxes at checkout, and Delivered Duty Unpaid (DDU), which Shopify also labels DAP (Delivered at Place), where the customer settles them with the carrier on delivery. Note that you can offer only one incoterm per country — not both.

One scope note before you choose. If your store runs Managed Markets, DDU support there ended on 24 August 2026 in every country and region where Managed Markets supports DDP, and remains available only where DDP isn't supported — markets that used or inherited DDU moved to DDP automatically, so those buyers now pay at checkout instead of at the door.

The changelog's exit before that date was to turn Managed Markets off before 24 August 2026, and after it Shopify still documents one route: to keep buyers in a DDP-supported market paying duties on delivery, deactivate Managed Markets for that market. On standard Markets nothing changes: you stay the merchant of record, and shipping DDU remains a normal option.

Keep this separate from the absorb-versus-pass-through choice above. DDP versus DDU decides where the buyer meets the charges at all; absorb versus pass-through is a display choice inside DDP — showing duties as a line item passes the €3 to the buyer at checkout, while including duties in your price absorbs it (that is step 5 of the setup checklist later on).

DDP vs DDU at a glance

The hidden cost of DDU: refused parcels

DDU looks cheaper because it costs you nothing upfront — but the new duty sharpens its hidden risk. When a DDU parcel reaches the border, the carrier asks your customer to pay the €3, any VAT not prepaid, and often a brokerage or disbursement fee before release. Shopify's own tariff guidance warns that this route “could lead to surprise fees for customers and potential delivery delays.”

The real sting is a refused parcel. If the buyer declines the surprise charge at the door — a very real risk when they never agreed to it — the shipment is returned or abandoned. You then typically absorb the return leg plus any duty the carrier already advanced, on top of losing the sale. That is why DDP, which shows the total at checkout, often works out cheaper than the “free” DDU route looks.

So which fits your store? The routes are genuinely different, not right and wrong — a tiny test-the-waters seller can reasonably ship DDU, while a brand shipping serious EU volume should almost certainly collect at checkout. Answer five quick questions and the quiz below routes you to yours.

HS Codes: Your €3-Per-Line Lever

Because the fee is counted per tariff line, your Harmonized System (HS) codes are not a compliance afterthought — they decide how many €3 charges each parcel attracts. Sloppy or missing classifications can inflate your line count or misjudge duties entirely, and accurate ones keep the count honest and low.

How Shopify assigns HS codes

In Shopify, you add an HS code on the product page, or type a description of the product to search for the right one. If a product has no code, Shopify falls back to its description and category to estimate duties — less precise, and more likely to misjudge your line count.

If a product has no code, description or category, Shopify's charging-duties page says duties are still calculated but are likely to be inaccurate — so give the product a code.

Custom items are a separate case. A hand-typed line isn't part of your product catalog, and Shopify documents duties on custom items in one narrow place — worth reading before you put one on an EU order.

Setting It Up in Shopify

The good news: Shopify has already done the heavy lifting. Its changelog confirms that both Managed Markets and the built-in import tax and duty calculation now support the flat €3 per tariff line on qualifying EU orders — the fee is calculated, displayed, and collected at checkout, with no settings changes required. That holds once duties at checkout are on. On standard Markets, if they aren't, your EU buyers still meet the €3 as an import charge on delivery — the checklist below is how you move it to checkout.

What Shopify handles automatically

There is one important eligibility split here. Managed Markets — where Global-e becomes the merchant of record and remits the duty for you — is available to merchants based in the continental United States, plus certain stores in Canada and the United Kingdom. (It is the tool formerly called Markets Pro.) If your store doesn't qualify for Managed Markets, you use Shopify's self-serve duty calculation instead, which also includes the €3 in the duty shown at checkout.

Setting up the wider Shopify Markets foundation — currencies, domains, translations — is a separate job covered in our Shopify Markets guide; here we focus only on the duties piece.

The duties-at-checkout setup

To collect duties in your checkout, you need a DDP-capable carrier, a store not using Shopify Fulfillment Network, and HS codes on your products. From there it lives under Settings > Taxes and duties. Work through the checklist below — your progress saves on this device. Steps 1–5 set up DDP collection; if the quiz above pointed you to DDU, you can skip the carrier and checkout-duty steps, but step 6 matters even more for you — your buyers meet the fee at the door, so tell them.

One cost to price in before you flip the switch. Collecting duties at checkout carries a transaction fee on every order that has duties calculated — even when the calculated amount is zero. Shopify temporarily lowered that fee to 0.5% on 2 February 2025; otherwise it is 0.85% for stores using Shopify Payments as their gateway and 1.5% for stores on other payment providers. It belongs to the self-serve duties-at-checkout route and is a separate cost from the €3 duty itself — worth putting into the margin math above before you decide to absorb rather than pass on.

In Shopify adminOpen in your store

1. Settings
2. Taxes and duties
3. Duties and import taxes

Zoom

Also selling to the US?

The same duties panel in your Shopify admin carries US-specific controls too — postal duty rates and a Section 232 steel-and-aluminum setting — because the United States runs its own, entirely separate tariff regime. If your store also imports or sells into the US, that side has its own moving parts; our guide to sourcing and the US tariff picture covers the inbound cost math and the de minimis changes there, which are a different story from this EU rule.

DIY or Bring in a Developer

For a small catalog on Managed Markets or the built-in calculator, this is genuinely a do-it-yourself job — an afternoon in the admin. The moment it stops being simple is when scale or custom logic enters: hundreds of SKUs that each need an accurate HS code, a bespoke duties display, or several markets running different incoterms and edge cases. Find your side of the line.

If you land on the right-hand column, the work is real but bounded — the kind of scoped project where hiring a Shopify developer pays for itself by getting HS codes, carriers, and checkout logic right the first time, instead of leaking €3s (or refused parcels) for months.

The Bottom Line

Strip away the headlines and this is a small, predictable cost you can plan around. The stores that handle it well do three unglamorous things: they price the €3 into their EU pricing, they keep their HS codes accurate so the line count stays honest, and they collect duties at checkout so a buyer never faces a doorstep surprise that turns into a refused parcel.

Frequently Asked Questions