[fru654]

Can anybody eli5 this law please?

If I read it right, I’d need to pay €3 on each item when Aliexpress bundles 20 1€ items together - €60 in tax for €20 worth of items, or effectively a 300% tax. That’s what the language implies with “applied to each different item, …, contained in a consignment.”

That’s not just a tax on revenue, or an incentive to buy locally - it’s prohibitory. Do they want to obliterate the "direct-to-consumer" cheap goods for good with this?

But who this law protects anyway? Most of “local” sellers that offer Aliexpress-kind of items (where else can I find my “stainless steel meat shredder claws” but there!?) basically drop ship from Taobao and the like in bulk. And this law now forces me to use them. What’s the point of this? A tiny revenue stream from handling fees? But even these drop shippers don’t offer much in terms of variety. Nor do or possibly can the supposedly big warehouses of Aliexpress-like platforms located within EU - it’s just not feasible. So this law implies that unregulated variety is a luxury now?

[Vespasian]

If it bundles them together into one parcel (while staying under 150€) I read the announcement such that the entire package would get taxed by 3€.

If I recall correctly some of the goals of this are

- to relieve the load on the custom s enforcement agencies by motivating sellers to import and declare goods in bulk.

- to make sure there is someone domestic who is legally responsible for liabilities and other regulations (e.g. for waste and EC compliance). It's easier to force a big company to do something than a 2 person shop in China. There are already laws in the book where the marketplace becomes liable if the actual seller cannot be found.

I believe AliExpress bulk imports much of its wares to EU warehouses already (at least popular stuff). It's not possible for everything but for popular items it's happening more and more frequently.