Week 28 - EU's €3 Ecommerce Fee Hits Shein and Temu: Plus AI Checkout Tools, Rising Ad Costs, and Etsy's New Appeal Process

Max: Welcome to the Checkout Point, your quick dive into this week's e-commerce buzz with me, Alex, powered by Blicket. These 20 minutes pack the latest trends, news and insights. Let's navigate the digital marketplace together. Ready? Let's go! Rachel: Welcome back to the Checkout Point. Big show today, so let's get moving. Speaker 3: Good energy already. I like it. Grab your coffee. Rachel: I already have mine, don't worry about me. Speaker 3: Every episode without fail. Rachel: Look, I've got charts, I've got clicks, and at least one decent joke lined up. Speaker 3: We'll see about that last part. Rachel: So first up, trade and policy. The EU just closed a loophole for cheap packages. Speaker 3: EC reported that starting this week that under 150 One hundred fifty euro customs exemption for e commerce is gone! Rachel: And Reuters is saying there's a flat three euro fee landing on parcels from places like Shein, Temu, AliExpress. Speaker 3: Three euros doesn't sound huge until you're shipping by the millions. Rachel: Right. That math gets interesting fast. Speaker 3: So anyway, after that we're getting into AI. Rachel: Yeah, how it's showing up at checkout, in product discovery, even inside supply chain forecasting. Interesting. Speaker 3: There's a stat on Amazon's AI-referred purchases that caught my eye. Speaker 4: Wow. Rachel: Oh, that reminds me, we're also covering the ad cost squeeze hitting online sellers this year. Speaker 3: Clicks getting pricier while returns shrink. Shocking. Rachel: I know, right? We'll look at what's driving that. Speaker 3: And I want to know the real cost to sellers versus the headline. Rachel: And later, Etsy is building a new way for sellers to push back when they get flagged. Speaker 3: That's been a long time coming for a lot of sellers. Rachel: Yeah, this one's kind of a big Speaker 3: Right. Rachel: deal. Speaker 3: We'll see if the fine print holds up. Rachel: So a packed one. Speaker 3: Let's get started with what's happening at the border. Rachel: Three easy ways to get your questions to us. Check the description for our web form, text us at 747-293-4612, or call the same number to leave a voice question. However you reach out, we can't wait to hear from you. So as of today, there's a literal price tag on your drop shipping side hustle. Three euros. That's it. Speaker 3: Three euros? That's the whole fee? Rachel: Three euros a parcel. Yeah, as reported by the European Commission. That's the new duty on any package under 150 euros coming into the EU. No more free pass. Speaker 3: Okay, so walk me through why this actually matters, because three euros sounds like nothing. Rachel: It sounds like nothing until you're moving, I don't know, two million packages a day? Speaker 3: Right, and that's exactly the volume we're talking about with Shein, Temu, AliExpress. Reuters reported this is a direct hit aimed at them. Rachel: It's like the EU built a toll booth nobody budgeted for and suddenly the whole highway's backed up. Speaker 3: But here's what I actually want to know. What does this do to landed cost? Because a three euro flat fee on a five dollar phone case is a totally different math problem than three euros on a fifty dollar jacket. Rachel: Totally different. On the cheap stuff, it's brutal percentage-wise. Speaker 3: Exactly. If you're a dropshipper running eight, nine percent margins already, three euros per unit can just eat the whole thing. Rachel: Wait, some of these sellers are running margins that thin? Speaker 3: Some of them, yeah. I've seen models where the entire profit was baked into that duty-free loophole. Take it away, and the spreadsheet just doesn't work anymore. Rachel: Which, I mean, kind of feels like the point. Speaker 3: That's how the Commission is framing it. EC's release says this closes an outdated exemption and levels things for EU businesses that never got that duty free ride. Rachel: Right, because a shop in Lisbon has been paying full duty this whole time while a warehouse in Guangzhou ships direct and skips it. Speaker 3: And Digital Watch Rachel: Right. Speaker 3: Observatory had a detail I thought was important: it's not the shopper who pays this, it's the seller or the importer who has to declare and pay it. Rachel: Oh, so Temu can't just quietly pass it to the customer at checkout without anyone noticing! Brissing! Speaker 3: Well, they can build it into pricing, sure, but the compliance burden, declaring it, paying it-that sits on the platform and the seller side. Rachel: Which is a whole different headache than just, you know, sticking a line item on an invoice. Speaker 3: It is; and Reuters also flagged the consumer safety angle, the commissions tying this to counterfeit and unsafe goods slipping through under that old threshold. Rachel: Yeah, the FashionNetwork piece on this made the same point, Europe calling it unfair competition from imports that used to just wander Speaker 5: in. Rachel: Walk-in duty free. Speaker 3: So you've got two arguments stacked together. Fairness for local retailers and safety for consumers. Politically, that's a pretty tidy package. Rachel: A pretty tidy for Brussels, not so tidy if you're running a one-person Shopify store sourcing from three different Chinese suppliers. Speaker 3: Right, because now every one of those supplier shipments is eating that fee separately. Rachel: Oh man, if you're doing a lot of small parcel dropshipments, this adds up. It's up fast—like, death by a thousand three-euro cuts. Speaker 3: That's actually a pretty accurate description of what a lot of sellers are staring at this week. Rachel: And it's not like the bigger platforms haven't seen this coming. Reuters noted Shein and Temu have already been shifting some fulfillment into EU warehouses to get ahead of exactly this. Speaker 3: Sure, local warehousing dodges some of it, but that's a capital investment small dropshippers just don't have. Rachel: Which is the actual split here, right? The big platforms can absorb this or route around it. The small operator running out of a garage cannot. Speaker 3: That's the gap I keep coming back to. This policy reads as anti-Shein on paper, but the pain lands hardest on the little guy riding on their supply chains. Rachel: Yeah. So if your margins just got squeezed by a customs stamp you didn't see coming, what do you even do? Cut costs somewhere else? Automate the parts that used to take you all day? Speaker 3: That's the real pressure point right now, isn't it? Everyone hunting for the tools that claw back what regulation just took. Rachel: Okay, so speaking of squeezed margins, this is exactly why I've been geeking out over what's happening with AI lately. Speaker 3: Uh-oh, here we go. Rachel: No, seriously. Hostinger just launched this thing where you snap one photo of a product and boom, you've got a working checkout link. No website, no code, nothing. Speaker 3: Wait, one photo? That's it? Rachel: That's it. GlobeNewswire covered the launch. The platform builds the product page, handles inventory, payments, and shipping. shipping from one dashboard and it plugs into wherever people already sell Instagram WhatsApp whatever small Speaker 3: Okay, Rachel: Speaker 3: but who's this actually for? No website needed sounds like a pitch, not a strategy. Rachel: sellers the person selling candles out of their garage who doesn't want to touch a theme editor plumb report it is free for existing hosting or customers Speaker 3: Frees a good price, but what's the ROI? Max: Does a photo to checkout link actually convert or is it just moving friction nobody was measuring? Rachel: Honestly, we don't have conversion numbers yet. It's brand new. But every extra step between I want this and I bought this is a leak. This kills like four steps at once. Max: Fair. Fewer clicks, fewer chances to bail. Rachel: Exactly. And it's not just checkout getting smarter. Discovery is too. Shopify rolled out AI-powered shopping apps this week that are changing how people find products. find products in the first place. Max: Right. Small Business Trends covered that. So instead of scrolling a category page, you're asking an AI to find you a jacket? Rachel: Pretty much. And it's not theoretical. Amazon's own clickstream data shows AI-referred purchases have doubled year over year. Laurie Sullivan reported that stat this week. Max: Doubled? That's a real jump. Rachel: Right? People are letting AI do the browsing for them now. Max: Which worries me a little, if AI is picking the the products who's optimizing for the AI instead of the customer? Rachel: That's a whole new SEO headache, honestly. Max: Different podcast probably, but speaking of AI moving actual money instead of just pixels, PYMNTS had a piece on AI closing a $184 billion gap in supply chain forecasting. Rachel: Whistles. $184 billion? That's a serious number. Max: It is. PYMNTS framed the real problem as never never being visibility. Companies have known where the breakdowns are for a decade. The hard part is deciding what to actually do about it. Rachel: So companies knew where the fires were. The paralysis was in choosing which hose to grab. Max: Exactly. From my Walmart days, that decision lag is where money leaks. You'd watch a stock out coming three weeks out and still be arguing over reorder quantities in a meeting. Rachel: Meetings, the real supply chain villain. Max: Yeah. If AI is shrinking that decision gap, that's real dollars on the table. Rachel: And that's the through line here: Hostinger's cutting steps out of checkout, Shopify and Amazon are cutting steps out of discovery, AI is cutting the lag out of decisions. Same move, different corner of the business. Max: I'll believe the ROI when I see adoption numbers next quarter, but the direction's clear. Rachel: Totally fair, though none of this fixes what it actually costs to get someone to your site in the first place. Max: Oh, don't get me started. The ad spend numbers out this week are rough. Rachel: Save it; I want to see those cost numbers. So all that AI upside is nice, but here's the invoice that comes with it. Oh no, hit me. Max: Cost per click is up 15% year over year. Kristoffsen broke it down on ChannelX.world, and ROAS (return on ad spend) dropped 46%. Rachel: Wait, wait, down 46%? That's not a dip, that's a cliff. Max: You're paying more to get less. Simple as that. Rachel: So the traffic tax went up and the payoff went down. Rough combo. Max: It's not one channel struggling. It's broad enough that just tweaking ad copy won't save you anymore. Rachel: So what, everybody just stops advertising? Max: No, you get sharper about where the money's leaking, which is why the funnel actually matters again. Rachel: Okay, geek time. Shopify put out an updated funnel metrics guide this week for tracking 2026 performance. Max: Break it down for me, plain language. Rachel: Think of it like a coffee shop. A hundred people walk by, that's traffic. Forty walk in, that's product views. Ten actually order, maybe three finish paying. Max: And most sellers are only staring at that first number, the walk-by count. Rachel: Right. If you don't know where people bail, long line, confusing menu, broken card reader, you're just guessing with real money. Max: Expensive guessing when clicks cost fifteen percent more than they did last year. Rachel: Yeah, guessing got a lot pricier. Max: Sig Ueland also ran a roundup on new e-commerce tools that dropped July 1st, worth a scan if you sell online. Rachel: What's actually in it? Max: Autonomous delivery services, review tools, GEO, generative engine optimization, live streaming, agentic commerce. Rachel: Impressive agentic commerce. AI agents shopping on your behalf. Max: That's the direction it's heading. Rachel: Before we move on, Robert Johnson had a piece on B2B growth drivers, right? Totally different animal than the D2C stuff we usually chew on. Max: Way different. A B2B buyer isn't impulse clicking a $19 candle. There's a procurement team, budget sign-off, three people on a call before anyone hits purchase. Rachel: So the funnel's just longer. Max: Much longer. Johnson flagged things like self-service ordering and account-based pricing as the real drivers there. A slick ad campaign barely moves that needle. Rachel: Different scoreboard, different game. Max: Speaking of scoreboards, sellers are about to get a small win on the marketplace side. Rachel: Ooh, tell me. Max: Etsy's finally building a way for sellers to push back when a listing is flagged. Rachel: Now that's a complaint I've heard forever. Max: Yeah, and it's about time somebody answered it. Rachel: Shifting gears, Etsy's finally throwing sellers a bone here. Max: Oh, yeah? Rachel: Ina Steiner is reporting that Etsy's building a listing level appeal process separate from the account level appeals that already exist. Max: Wait, sellers could already appeal getting suspended, but if a single listing got flagged they were just stuck? Rachel: Yep, no recourse: your item gets pulled, you get some vague policy citation, and that's it. Case closed. Max: Long have sellers been asking for this. Rachel: Ina Steiner has covered Etsy seller forums for years, and this complaint shows up in basically every one of them. It's like the seller version of please fix the printer. Max: That specific, huh? Rachel: Pretty much. A listing gets yanked over a photo, a keyword, whatever, and there's no way to say, wait, that's wrong. Max: So what's actually changing? Because we're working on it from a marketplace can mean next month or never. Rachel: Steiner frames it as Etsy responding to sustained seller pressure. No firm rollout date yet, so cautiously optimistic. Max: I'll believe it when I actually see the Appeal button. Rachel: Skepticism duly noted. Max: Just protecting my expectations. Rachel: Okay, okay. So practically, what should shop owners do once this goes live? Max: Document now: screenshots of the listing before it got flagged, the policy language, your message threads with support, build the paper trail before you need it. Speaker 3: Right. Rachel: And don't just accept the takedown as final—once there's a path, use it. Max: Right. And watch how Etsy actually runs it: does it add a real review, or is the button just cosmetic? Rachel: A button labeled "Appeal" doesn't mean much if the review behind it is just a rubber stamp. Max: Exactly; but compared to zero options it's a a real step for small shops! Rachel: Small step; sellers will take it after waiting this long for it. All right, that's the show. Max: Feels like a full one. Rachel: Yeah, the coffee shop funnel thing is still stuck in my head. A hundred people walk by and only three actually pay. Max: Right. And I still want an answer on that Hostinger tool. Does a photo checkout actually convert or does it just remove friction nobody was measuring? Rachel: That's the one we're keeping an eye on. Max: And the Etsy appeal process. Sellers finally get to push back on listing violations. and document Rachel: everything while you wait, right? Max: Always. Rachel: So the big takeaway, check out ads, supply chain, all of it's getting rebuilt by AI at the same time. Max: And the sellers tracking their own numbers are the ones who'll handle it best. Rachel: Right. Brightening. If you like this one, subscribe, leave us a review. It helps more than you think. Max: It really does. Rachel: Thanks for hanging out with us. Bye, everybody.