EU imposed €3 fee on small parcels in hit to Shein, Temu and AliExpres

**Sarah Rogers** (0:01)
Why online shopping just got more expensive for millions of people? It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service. I'm Sarah Rogers. Also, US President Donald Trump makes a billion from crypto and the price of oil teeters close to pre-war levels.
Yes, first, a story that might not go down too well with the European shoppers who love filling up their online baskets with cheap goods from China. From today, the European Union has introduced a custom charge of just over $3 on low value items bought outside the block. It was good white last day, girls, but now it is over.

**Joe Tidy** (0:44)
All of these custom charges are just getting too out of hand.

**Sarah Rogers** (0:46)
How much do you think I would be paying in customs if I ordered these three dresses off of Sheen? Now, they're the exact same style, exact same fabric. You would think, okay, well, three-year-old, they're all dresses, wrong. Well, businesses are meant to pay the charge, but plenty of shoppers, like you've just heard, aren't convinced. Now, it'll heavily impact purchases from Chinese companies, Sheen, Tmoo and AliExpress. Previously, anything bought for less than $170 was exempt from duties. The EU commission, though, says low value parcels reached nearly $7 billion in 2025 That's four times the 2022 total, with around 90% coming from China.
Dirk Houting is a Dutch MEP for the centre-right European People's Party and the lead negotiator on the legislation.

**Dirk Houting** (1:30)
What we've seen is an absolute tidal wave of very low value products, mostly from China, who do not comply with our legislation, come into the European market without paying taxes and unfairly competing against European producers.
The value of these packages was often very low, but in fact the costs for society, if you think about the waste costs or recycling costs, everything that had to do with health, safety and security, were actually quite high. So it's high time that we make them pay.

**Sarah Rogers** (2:07)
You say it's high time to make them pay, but we're hearing that it's being passed on to customers right away.

**Dirk Houting** (2:13)
It's quite possible, yes, but in fact the basic problem is we're putting extremely low value products on very expensive airplanes on the other side of the planet, and it is totally unsustainable business model.

**Sarah Rogers** (2:25)
Is that fair for shoppers, though? They should be able to choose whatever they want from wherever they want and pay the price that's there.

**Dirk Houting** (2:31)
Well, you know, our European producers are sticking to the rules, paying their taxes, and a lot of the producers in China that put products onto our market are not. And I think that is unfair. You have products like jewelry or makeup that contain chemicals that we do not use here in Europe.

**Sarah Rogers** (2:49)
Will this actually make online shopping any safer? Or is it mainly about protecting European businesses from cheap competition?

**Dirk Houting** (2:57)
Honestly, it will do both. We have to break that toxic business model of very low value, non-compliant products, higher value products that are of good quality, are always welcome on the European market, also from China.
But we need to get rid of what I call soon to be trash.

**Sarah Rogers** (3:15)
And where is all the money that you'll be making in taxes going to go?

**Dirk Houting** (3:19)
Partially it will go to support national budgets, part will also go to the European budget to support basically the work that will be done also in the European internal market and the customs controls that need to be done.

**Sarah Rogers** (3:31)
Dirk, MAP, Dirk Houtink.
Well, there's been questions this week over the US around peace talks, but despite uncertainty over a final agreement, oil prices have continued to fall. Brent Crude fell 1.6% to just under $72 a barrel. That's closer level seen before the war started. Now to the US as a mandatory financial reports revealed, President Donald Trump made more than a billion dollars last year from businesses dealing in crypto currency. The BBC's cyber correspondent is Joe Tidy.

**Joe Tidy** (4:03)
Yes, it's this intriguing part of the filing. It says that Trump made $635 million from a partnership with something called Celebration Coins. Not much is known about this company. I can't find anything about this company on the Internet. But we think this is the royalties that he's earned from lending his name and his image to the company to make the meme coin Trump. So there are lots and lots of different cryptocurrencies. Everyone's probably heard of Bitcoin, which is the first one that was invented. But meme coins, they don't really have any value. They don't have any utility. They're just coins that are invented to celebrate a person or an event. Quite often, they are seen as a bit of a fun part of the cryptocurrency world. But people do invest in them as well to try and make money.