France’s Parcel Tax: The Cost Is Always Someone Else’s

Over the past decade, Europe has watched Chinese e-commerce giants quietly reshape its retail landscape. Platforms like Shein, Temu, and AliExpress flooded European markets with ultra-cheap goods, exploiting a customs exemption that allowed parcels valued under €150 to enter the EU duty-free. Eventually, policymakers decided to act. France moved ahead of schedule. The result was a textbook lesson in what happens when legislators rush to be seen doing something, without pausing to check whether it would actually work.

French customs recorded 170 million imported small items in 2022, worth €1.9 billion. By 2024, that figure had exploded to 773 million items worth €5.3 billion. China accounted for 97% of the volume. The average price per item dropped from €11.30 to €6.40 over the same period: more packages, cheaper goods, each one flown thousands of kilometers. The competitive strain on French and European retailers was growing, and so was the environmental absurdity of the model.

This problem was already being addressed at the European level. In February 2025, the European Commission proposed a handling fee for small parcels from outside the EU. By December 2025, the EU Council had authorized a flat €3 fee per item category, set to take effect on July 1, 2026.

Customs policy falls under the EU’s exclusive competence since 1968. Any measure applied by a single country would inevitably push flows toward neighboring states not subject to the same tax. A customs fence only works if it runs around the entire bloc.

Rather than wait, the French government included a €2-per-parcel tax in its 2026 budget, effective March 1, 2026, four months before the EU-wide measure.

Industry professionals immediately pushed back. France’s e-commerce federation (FEVAD), La Poste, and logistics trade groups warned in unison: the tax would not reduce the volume of Chinese parcels reaching France. It would reroute them. Packages would fly into Belgium, the Netherlands, or Germany, then travel into France by road, entirely exempt.

Policymakers were explicitly told this would happen. It was not speculation. It was basic geography.

Italy introduced a similar €2 tax on January 1, 2026. Within three months, the results were so damaging that the government suspended the measure entirely. Volumes at Italian airports collapsed, not because Italians stopped buying from Shein, but because all packages were now routing through German and Belgian hubs and arriving by truck, untaxed. The Italian freight sector took the blow; consumers barely noticed.

By late March 2026, Italy had frozen its tax and decided to wait for the EU measure.

France’s Parliament voted anyway.

Within days of March 1, customs declarations for e-commerce parcels dropped by 92% at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle. At Liège Airport in Belgium, volumes tripled. At Vatry Airport in the Marne, whose activity was 75% freight, throughput collapsed from 1,000 tonnes in February to 200 tonnes in March. Its owner is now contemplating closure and the loss of 120 direct jobs.

At Clevy Links, a logistics company operating out of an 11,000 m² Roissy warehouse, daily throughput went from 200,000 parcels to effectively zero. One hundred employees came to work with nothing to do.

The Director General of French Customs testified on May 13, 2026: the tax was generating approximately €2.3 million per month, against an annual target of €600 million. That is roughly 0.4% of the projected yield. Up to 1,000 jobs are expected to be cut across the sector.

While French legislators congratulated themselves, Shein was building its long-term response. Near Wrocław, Poland, the company opened a logistics hub spanning 740,000 square meters, one of the largest e-commerce warehouses in Europe.

By importing goods in bulk into the Polish warehouse, Shein handles customs compliance at the EU entry point. Once goods are inside the bloc, they move freely. A parcel from Wrocław to Paris faces no more customs friction than one shipped from Lyon. Delivery times drop to two to five days, matching Zalando or Amazon. Shein has also opened its platform to third-party European sellers, completing a pivot from “cheap Chinese retailer” to “European e-commerce infrastructure provider.”

They are not fighting the rules. They are restructuring their business to make the rules irrelevant.

Let’s be direct about what happened here.

The mechanism by which a national tax within a single market gets bypassed requires no economic modeling. It requires only the understanding that goods travel the path of least resistance, that Belgium is next to France, and that trucks cross EU borders freely. Industry professionals stated this explicitly, in advance. Italy had demonstrated it empirically, in real time. The French Parliament voted for it anyway, 208 to 87.

The minister who championed the measure, Amélie de Montchalin, framed the vote in bluntly emotional terms: those who opposed the tax had “not chosen France.” It was a rhetorical trick designed to make competent objection politically toxic.

This is what happens when policymakers treat reality as something to be negotiated rather than obeyed. They didn’t lack information. They lacked the intellectual honesty to engage with it, and the humility to look at what had just happened in Italy and ask: should we maybe not do this? They behaved as if a strongly worded decree were sufficient to override logistics, geography, and basic market behavior.

And this is the part that should make you genuinely angry: none of them will face any consequences. Nobody resigned. Nobody apologized to the workers at Vatry and Roissy who might lose their jobs because of a policy that experts told them, loudly and clearly, would not work. When pressed, the answer will be some variation of “we couldn’t have known.” Except they could have. People told them. Italy showed them. They chose not to listen.

But what if some of them knew perfectly well?

Not every vote in that 208-to-87 count was necessarily cast in ignorance. The hemicycle may be split between wishful legislators who genuinely could not foresee the consequences, and a quieter, more calculating figure: the fox who looked at a €600 million line item, decided some collateral damage was an acceptable price, and used a crowd-pleasing anti-Shein narrative as cover for what was, in effect, a fiscal convenience. Cutting spending is politically painful. And raising taxes is hardly easier in a country that already carries one of the highest tax burdens in the developed world. But they could find a sector few voters care about, and let it absorb the cost. The alternative would have been confronting a more uncomfortable question: whether France can indefinitely sustain its current level of public spending.

The budgetary pressures are not unique to France. What turns them into bad policy is the absence of accountability. The people who design the policy and the people who live with its consequences are rarely the same people. That asymmetry does not produce good laws. It produces this.