We want to make you aware of important upcoming changes to shipments heading towards the European Union. These changes affect all non-EU stores importing products into the EU, not just TLDR News.

Starting 1 July 2026, under new EU requirements, a fixed customs duty of €3.00 per unique HS code will apply to all consignments valued under €150 entering the EU.

In our case specifically:

• A parcel containing a magazine and a book, each with two different HS codes, will occur an additional charge of €6.00 as each product falls under a different HS code.
• A parcel containing a bundle of four magazines, each with the same HS code, will occur an additional charge of €3.00 as all items share the same HS code.

We will attempt to collect these additional duties at checkout, but as things stand, Shopify, our platform, does not appear to have announced a plan regarding the collection of these new duties.

We will temporarily suspend shipments a few days before the 1st July deadline to ensure that we remain compliant with the regulations. After we confirm that we can indeed collect these duties at checkout, we'll restart shipping.

The European Commission is also exploring a separate €2.00 parcel customs fee, due to come into effect on 1st November 2026.

Unfortunately, this means that the customs costs will increase yet again for customers in the EU. While we have sent numerous suggestions to the European Commission, including, but not limited to, exemption of duties based on the HS code, these suggestions more or less fell on deaf ears. We firmly believe that these additional duties will hurt small business enterprises even more as setting up a separate warehouse in a country based within the EU is, at the moment, unsustainable.