The €150 duty exemption is gone. What the EU’s €3 duty does to a margin.

For years a parcel worth €150 or less could enter the European Union without customs duty. VAT has been due on it since 2021, but the duty was waived. That waiver ended on 1 July 2026.

In its place the EU charges a temporary flat duty of €3, set by Council Regulation (EU) 2026/382. It applies until 1 July 2028, when the EU Customs Data Hub is due to take over and ordinary duty rates, product by product, apply instead.

How the €3 is counted

The charge is per item in the consignment, by tariff classification — not per parcel. A parcel holding three T-shirts of the same kind is one item for this purpose. A parcel holding a T-shirt, a mug and a phone case is three, and carries €9.

• It applies to distance sales of imported goods in consignments up to €150 — goods shipped from outside the EU straight to a customer inside it.
• It applies whichever VAT arrangement the seller uses: IOSS, the special arrangements, or standard import VAT.
• It is charged to the declarant — the seller, the IOSS holder or their representative — and the Commission states plainly that it is not a tax on consumers.
• A narrow exception exists for goods of preferential origin declared on a full customs declaration rather than collected through IOSS.

Who it reaches

A store that holds its stock inside the EU and ships from there is not affected by this change: bulk imports above €150 were never exempt, and the parcels it sends to customers are not imports. The store it does reach is the one that ships to European customers from outside the EU — a dropshipping supplier in China, a brand fulfilling from the UK or the United States.

What it does to the figure that stays

Take a single €39 product sold to a customer in Germany. Inside that price is 19% VAT, so the store keeps €32.77 before any cost. A €3 duty, if the store absorbs it, is 9.2% of that — before advertising, before the product, before the payment fee. On a store running a 20% net margin, that is close to half the profit on the order.

The arithmetic: €39 ÷ 1.19 = €32.77 kept after VAT. €3 ÷ €32.77 = 9.2%. Redo it with your own price and your own destination’s rate — the share is larger the cheaper the product.

Shopify moved the same way on the checkout side. On 11 August 2026 Managed Markets ended support for DDU — delivered duty unpaid — and switched the affected markets to collecting duties at checkout. The customer now sees the duty before paying rather than at the door; the store now has a line on the order it must account for.

Where it belongs in your numbers

Duty is a landed cost. It belongs with cost of goods, per order, not in a general overhead line where it disappears into an average. Charged to the customer at checkout it is money in and money out on the same order; absorbed by the store it is a cost that should lower the margin of exactly the products it applies to.

In Profflow the place for it is the product’s landed cost: enter the unit cost with the duty included, and the margin of exactly the products it applies to drops — the item that now costs €3 more to land shows it, rather than the whole store’s average absorbing it quietly.