The rules were designed to curb fast fashion and low-value imports. Our stalled garment shipments show who’s really paying.
Like many small businesses, we are thrilled when brands email us about our order shipments. So we were over the moon to hear our garments from Japan had arrived in Italy. We completed the customs paperwork immediately because we couldn’t wait to receive them.
Then we waited. Waited. Waited. And waited.
And then, we called customer service multiple times — almost every day — only to reach a digital assistant that gives zero assistance. When we’ve been lucky, we’ve been able to talk to a human — hurray, a human voice! — but we got no meaningful explanation: procedures take time.
Meanwhile, the garments we had carefully selected for our customers remain inaccessible. We cannot photograph them and upload them to our website; we cannot present them. And for those of you asking to try them: no, we cannot sell them. Every day of delay means lost income those garments were supposed to generate. Small businesses will understand.
We asked ourselves what could be wrong this time. Customs procedures were slow, but we have never experienced delays of this magnitude, nor such a wall whenever we tried to get information. After some research, we connected the dots.
The introduction of the new rules changed the circumstances significantly.
The new duties and fees on parcels from outside the EU — such as the €3 EU duty per tariff item in force since 1 July 2026 and the upcoming €2 EU handling fee from 1 November 2026, plus the Italian national levy postponed to 1 December 2026 — are indeed causing delays, customs congestion, and operational problems that also affect business goods and the B2B supply chain.
Why even small business shipments are caught in the backlog
Three things make the situation particularly concerning.
First, the EU is changing how it processes low-value imports. Removing the €150 customs-duty exemption, introducing the €3 duty on qualifying consignments, and adding new data requirements all increase complexity — at a time when customs authorities are already handling enormous parcel volumes. Requiring checks on every individual tariff line, rather than the parcel as a whole, multiplies the number of declarations to process.
Second, these measures sit within a broader transition. The new duties and handling fee have specific scopes and don’t apply indiscriminately to all business imports — but changes to processing requirements and data systems raise wider questions about how efficiently goods move through the supply chain, and small stocks, components and samples get pulled into the same verification flows.
Third, businesses can be left bearing the commercial consequences of delays they cannot control. Stock remains unavailable, money is tied up, planned sales are lost. And because fees accrue when the declaration is accepted — non-refundable even if goods are later held — carriers have little incentive to speed things up, and some incentive to slow deliveries for extra checks.
When communication from carriers offers no real explanation or timeframe, there is little a small business can do except wait.
Layer overlapping national and EU measures on top of this, and the risk of confusion and operational friction becomes even harder to ignore.
Sadly, this was predicted.
In a letter dated 22 May 2026, DHL, FedEx and UPS warned EU finance ministers of a “real risk” that shipments could be held up at EU borders “without a stable and workable legal framework,” citing new data requirements that “cannot realistically be implemented” by the 1 July deadline. Specifically, they flagged supply chain bottlenecks and possible shortages of some medical supplies. (Reuters, 22 May 2026)
Ultimately, the EU’s new parcel levies were intended to curb fast fashion imports and address the surge in low-value e-commerce. Yet the wider disruption feared by logistics operators could affect businesses far removed from the online marketplaces these measures are intended to regulate.
In fact, they’re hitting small businesses, including our B2B shipments. We are not a logistics giant, and our shipment carries no medical supplies. But when our garments have been sitting in customs for weeks, we have become one of those bottlenecks.
As of today, our garments are still sitting there. More than a month after the first shipment arrived at Italian customs on 16 September.
For a small independent business doing everything possible to survive while keeping its environmental impact as low as possible, selecting a limited number of carefully chosen pieces, this isn’t an administrative inconvenience. It can mean the difference between making a living and being unable to keep the business going.