Barely announced and already scrapped. The €2 tax grandly introduced last March on small parcels from China will be suspended starting Wednesday, July 1st. Widely circumvented by platforms like Shein, Temu, and AliExpress, it is being replaced by a new European tax of €3.
How Platforms Dodged the French Tax
The original €2 levy, applied to packages worth less than €150 purchased on Chinese platforms, did not have the intended effect. It failed to push all French consumers to reduce their orders. “If the amount is high, you won’t have the tax. I think it will just push people to buy more,” one shopper noted in a street interview.
The government’s goal was clear: use a tax to limit the flood of orders from Chinese sites. “It’s two euros per item, it’s very important that we apply it ourselves as quickly as possible,” explained Amélie de Montchalin, the former Minister of Transformation and Public Services, back in November 2025.
However, Chinese retail giants quickly found a workaround. To escape the French-specific levy, they simply rerouted shipments through other countries, such as Belgium, which did not apply such a tax, before delivering the parcels by truck into France. The result was a fiscal failure. The tax generated only €2.3 million per month, nearly 14 times less than the French government had projected.
A New European Levy System
Due to its ineffectiveness, the national tax is being suspended in favor of a European levy that will apply to each category of item. From July 1st, a small parcel containing two t-shirts, for example, will be subject to a total tax of €3. However, a package containing two t-shirts and a pair of pants will be taxed twice, bringing the total to €6.
Economists are already expressing skepticism regarding the harmonized enforcement of this new system. “A tax of this type only truly works if everyone plays the game in an extremely strict and severe manner. We can honestly have doubts about whether it will be applied harmoniously across all countries,” warned Anthony Morlet-Lavidalie, an economist at the Rexecode Institute.
The Next Circumvention: European Warehouses
The platforms appear to have already anticipated methods to bypass the new European rules. Shein, for instance, has reportedly bet on Poland with a massive 740,000 square meter warehouse. The strategy involves shipping products from China in bulk volumes, thus avoiding the new individual parcel tax. Once inside Europe, the goods would be packaged into small parcels and transported by road.
Starting next November, the amount of this European tax is even scheduled to increase, potentially rising to €5 per item.
