Important bit of information: China gets subsidised parcel fee under an agreement of the World Post Association. They pay less for postage than European businesses shipping within the continent.
Why is this not changed? Why all these additional taxes and hoops when they could simply cancels these subsidies?
It’s managed by the Universal Postal Union, which is part of the UN, and the organisation has been in effect in one form or another since 1874 with 192 members currently. International treaties between so many countries are extremely difficult to reform. It’s much easier to make a new treaty than reform an existing one because there are so many vested interests in the current system.
In this case, the subsidy is designed to help developing countries have fair access to the global post system. But when it was created, it was likely not envisioned that a developing country might become a rich country, nor that the postal system would become such an important part of e-commerce.
Good question. I guess you have to ask those responsible.
They’re implicit subsidies.
So here it goes: there’s an international treaty saying basically “if a letter from your country is delivered in my contry, I’ll deliver it for free and vice versa”. So, you pay your national post some “international handling” so they e.g. deliver it to China, but in China the national post is now responsible for distribution and last mile for free, they don’t see a part of your postage.
So it’s subsidized now by the Chinese post basically: they only charge cents for “international shipping” to their citizens and businesses, last mile is handled for free from the local national post offices.
That system obviously was designed to work frictionless and easy in a time, where there was no globalized market to speak of.
It’s not so easy to reform and just cancel it might be a disadvantage as well: then all your other mailing stuff needs renegotiating as well. Just imagine the horror in canceling the treaty, and then you need to sit down with dealmaker Trump who sees an opportunity in order to get the US Post to handle your mail 😱
easier to add a new agreement than cancel an old i guess. treaties are hard
I’ve wondered for years how they manage free shipping for all the small shit.
I’m guessing it just goes on flights that would be going anyway, probably filling in gaps where larger packages don’t fit which would just be empty anyway.
No clue what agreements they have with the carriers to let them do that for dirt cheap, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.
The only people that can import cheap Chinese stuff are corporations… don’t you dare bypassing their money making schemes
No, that’s a very naive and uninformed viewpoint. The EU is being flooding with 100s of millions of packages with value-free SHEIN and temu stuff, the delivery services even do not know how to handle it anymore. It is a tremendous danger for local industry, it is very bad for the environment. Do some online research, you will be impressed with the impact of these cheap products literally flooding into the European Union.
Aren’t those same cheap products coming in through corporations that sell it under some brand at triple the cost?
The “local” industries have already been decimated by the big conglomerates which imported the same cheap Chinese stuff and sold it as a hilarious profit.
It’s not the same stuff, though. A lot of these products do not fulfill any product safety law. There have been lots tests of random products sold on these platforms, showing that many are unsafe and/or dangerous (just google). A business sourcing from China has to ensure that sold products are safe and fulfill legal requirements. And yes, for this “service” they charge higher prices, and sometimes even unjustifiedly.
Right in the article they cite the analysis has numbers on a few groups of products like protrction equipment, makeup, and whether they pass EU standards. 60%-something do not. That also means 30%-something pass EU standards. That’s a lot of quality cheap product. Of course as a consumer you can’t tell whether you’re getting something from the 35% pile or the 65% one. But that doesn’t detract from the point of a lot of the cheap stuff in the category is the same stuff when it comes to EU standards.
Here’s an anecdote - years ago I really wanted a magnetic USB cable. Being skeptical of AliExpress stuff, especially electrical, I found a North American brans called Volta. Bought a cable. Cost me CAD $20 or $30. Some time after, I was browsing AliExpress for some specialty ebike parts that aren’t imported in Canada, I took a look at the magnetic cables they got. After a few pages of results I found a suspiciously similar cable to the Volta sold by the manufacturer itself. $3-4 for a set with a few magnetic tips. Ordered one. Once it came, I meticulously compared it to the Volta. It was identical in every way. It even failed in the same weak spot after a couple of years of use as the Volta. So yeah, while not everything is the same, not everything is not the same either.
Side note - the AliExpress prices are not the low prices available in other cheaper Chinese domestic retailers. Stuff on AliExpress already has significant markups. Volta did not pay $3-4 for that cable. They prolly paid $0.50-1 if even that much. They made exorbitant profit.
Sure, go and buy the stuff if you want. Personally, I do not have the competence to know which products contain harmful chemicals, for instance. I am not questioning that a lot of products are badly made quality wise. I’m just saying that any European retailer / producer is legally responsible to ensure the product is safe and not harmful. And testing costs money, believe it or not. (Yes they carry out tests. I have worked for a large retailer)
Wouldn’t it be nice to have cheap, pocket mass spectrometers. 😅
USB cables are actually a great example of where finding a brand with a good name does matter. Lots of cheap cables don’t properly follow the spec and then people end up frying their steam deck or other hardware.
It’s not so bad for data transfer but a real issue when you’re using them for supplying more power for computers or other expensive devices.
So basically they are flooding eu with like small pox blankets in the form of consumer products with like lead or whatever in them. While getting paid for it
Not sure what safety small plastic stuff or disposable fashion products need to pass to merit the extra prices
For clothing, some have been found to have significant amounts of heavy metals in their dyes. That said, as the article itself says - more than a third passes EU standards.
But a bike wrench? A torque meter? A portable oscilliscope? No issues there. Some of those things are simply prohibitively expensive from EU/NA brands and are still made in China. I had to diagnose a signaling issue on an ebike I built. Were it not for Hantek and AliExpress, I’d simply given up and unable to solve it.
Were it not for cheap Chinese tools I wouldn’t have been able to develop the skills to build ebikes at all. I’ve now built 5 so far. I could easily turn this into a (co-op) business if get shitcanned from my job.
Exactly my point.
And to clarify, I understand what the other posters are saying (against my argument) but I am just done with all the protections for corporate profit
I personally don’t buy much clothes or care about fashion but, like your example, I am very frequently buying tools or small repair parts that the corporations either refuse to provide (to force you to buy a brand new whatever) or make ridiculously expensive
And to clarify, I understand what the other posters are saying (against my argument) but I am just done with all the protections for corporate profit
Exactly on the same page. Paying these exorbitant markups is usually not even flowing to local labour. The distribution centres are staffed at close to minimum wage. The margins go to the top where they contribute to rising wealth inequality which makes us poorer year after year. Fuck that.
E: Also Frigidaire sold me a plastic drawer rail for my fridge, shitty injection molded part from a worn mold, a part they’ve been making for decades, no more than cents to make, for CAD $60.
E2: If we’re gonna solve this for real by abandoning free trade as we know it, nationalizing the oligarchy’s wealth and reinvesting that in protected domestic industries that make most of what we need, paying wages that afford to buy that product, then I’ll be happy to be denied access to AliExpress and I’d be able to buy a CSA-certified Maple Electronics scope made in Windsor, ON. A few bucks on de-minimims - prolly won’t do it. Besides, it’s a regressive tax hitting the poorest most.
But you will still be able to buy such products, but with an additional 3 euros, I don’t see anything changing in terms of safety
Kinda seems like a tax on the poor for being unable to afford better products.
You don’t get better products. You get products without safety testing, warranty or support. Clothes from some eastern brands have high amounts of chemicals that are forbidden in Europe because they cause cancer or infertility. Some type of escooter was banned in the UK some years ago because the dodgy electronics where responsible for multiple house fires. Iot devices or computers from some no name brand won’t get updates if a hacker finds exploits to mine Bitcoins on it, or spy on you and capture your logins from your cheap temu wifi router.
You should reread their comment, you agree with each other.
You are right, sorry. I did not have my coffee yet.
Look at who funded and lobbied for this, this isn’t about protecting EU manufacturing, most of these companies manufacture their goods outside the EU and charge exorbitant prices for them.
This is once again taking the power out of the proles hands.
Parent Corporate Member Key Retail Brands & Subsidiaries Annual Revenue Schwarz Group Lidl, Kaufland, PreZero €185.6 Billion REWE Group BILLA, REWE, Penny, Toom Baumarkt, BIPA €100.4 Billion Ahold Delhaize Albert Heijn, Delhaize, Alfa Beta, Mega Image, Maxi, Albert €92.35 Billion Carrefour Group Carrefour, Carrefour Market, Express, Atacadão, Cora, Match €91.48 Billion Tesco PLC Tesco, Tesco Express, One Stop €82 Billion Inditex Zara, Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius €36 Billion H&M Group H&M, COS, Monki, Weekday, & Other Stories, ARKET €21 Billion Colruyt Group Colruyt, Okay, Spar €11.19 Billion Credit to https://www.reddit.com/user/Interesting_Pie_319/ for the data.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aliexpress/comments/1ugpyoe/i_dug_around_a_bit_and_found_exactly_who_is/
The difference is that these companies have to adhere to EU regulations, e.g. on harmful chemicals. Cheap Chinese products famously do not, often times to an absurd degree, exceeding limits by thousands of times.
Then regulate the products and impose fines?
and not forget sites like temu burn money to sell this stuff cheap while these have to actually run a profitable business. But 100 Billion Alibaba and 50 Billion Temu are the good guys in this, i guess
All companies selling in the EU market have to adhere to the General Product Safety Regulation even if the product and vendor is Chinese. The problem here is not the law, but enforcing the law.
Should be specified that is not specific to Chinese imports, it’s to any import from any country outside of EU
In the meantime Chinese companies built warehouses in Europe, which are importing the cheap goods en grosse. You’re buying from a Chinese supplier, but the parcel is sent out from Europe.
Much more easy to regulate those. That’s kind of the point.
In the meantime Chinese companies built warehouses in Europe, which are importing the cheap goods en grosse.
They probably weren’t, at least for the things being described here, as the article is talking about de minimis.
The de minimis exception basically let low-value packages through without paying import tariffs.
There’s some reason to do that — it’d be more expensive to process the (many) low-value packages.
However, this also meant that if someone imported something in small, low-value amounts, they didn’t have to pay import tariffs, whereas people doing bulk imports did.
This was a major reason for the explosion of Chinese online retailers in the West, like Temu. They’d sell something that was shipped directly from China, which meant that they didn’t need to pay import tariffs on it. Traditional importers would import a large batch and would need to pay import tariffs, and then distribute the large batch from within the country in question, which penalized traditional retail.
ooo, i like you. de minimis is my favorite legal term
Can they put an exclusion for electronic components? 90% of the shit isn’t manufactured in the EU and local companies buy it from China and charge you 10x the price.
Mouser isn’t a bad option
e-commerce in Europe is laughably bad no wonder people are turning to Temu and China and abroad in general. It’s either Amazon or outdated brick stores with their own archaic tech that works sometimes, and surprises you with a couple extra fees every single checkout.
The only redemption right now is Shopify rollout for boosting small shops which is hard to mess up but even that is being overtaken by scam spam.
The service is just so bad that people will wait 2 weeks for potentially dangerous products and deal with customs just to save cup of coffee worth of money. The service is the issue not anything else.
I use Aliexpress because half the products on amazon are just dropshipper that buy from Aliexpress anyway. Why should I pay more for the same product? But there are genuinely good e-commerce in Europe that sells local products (Zalando for example)
It not just per parcel, but per product category. Multiple categories in one parcel multiple times €3 customs.
This is where the DIY electronics hobbyist scene in the EU dies.
Good going corpos, you win. I’ll just consume your media and goon at home.
Wonderful!
€3 sounds to me too low to matter.
I know several people who buy crap from Shein and Temu - 3€ will definitely help.
