Hey all!
I hope you're all well and surviving this crazy heat!
I'm making this blog post to help outline new EU regulations that are coming into effect as of Wednesday 1st July 2026. Hopefully this blog post can help customers and other businesses get a better understanding of what to expect. I have been spending a lot of time prepping ahead of these changes to make sure we are not excluding our lovely customers throughout Europe.
The European Union (EU27) will eliminate the customs duty-free treatment for low-value imports — shipments valued at €150 or less. At the same time, a new flat-rate customs duty for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) shipments will be introduced [1].
In place is a flat rate charge of €3 per item category. I am still unclear on whether the EU will be using a 6-digit (a more broader item category) or 10-digit HS code (more specific item category). Depending on which one is required as of 1st July, it could make a huge difference to how much these customs fees will add up to. In relation to our store, if you were to purchase 2 CDs, you will be charged €3 total. However, if you were to purchase 2 CDs and a DVD, you will be charged €6. A CD and DVD falls under the same 6-digit HS code but separate code if it's 10-digits [2]. Due to this unclarity, I'm going into this expecting 10-digit and would advise any of our EU based customers to be under this impression.
The countries effected by this are as following:
Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden.
What are be doing differently?
We will be emailing every EU base customers after their purchase with a rough estimate on what customs fees they will be expecting to pay if they go ahead with the shipment of their order. Due to this, all EU orders will now take around 5 working days to be shipped.
Along with this, us as a business will be charged a further handling fee by our courier so we will, unfortunately, be rising the price of shipping.
The first month or 2 of these regulations will certainly be a learning curve for me so I kindly ask for you all to be patient with me whilst I figure out the best approach to make sure everyone is happy and can still increase their music collections with us. In the event that this doesn't work out well, we may suspend shipments to EU countries but this is a very VERY last resort!
It's useful to know as a UK customer that similar regulations are expected to come into force for us by October 2028 and could be pushed forward by our government [3].
Useful Links:
[1] https://www.dhl.com/discover/en-vn/news-and-insights/eu-customs-changes-2026
[2] https://www.dhl.com/discover/en-hk/logistics-advice/import-export-advice/eu-customs-reform
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