Week 37 - The EU's Ecommerce Customs Shakeup: Descartes' Filing Fix, Holiday Sales Forecasts, and Spain's E-commerce Boom

MaxWelcome 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.

RachelOkay, so real talk. This week's lineup looks boring on paper.

Speaker 3Drive customs paperwork. Be still, my heart.

RachelRight? Like, I read the headline and almost fell asleep mid-scroll.

Speaker 3But you didn't.

RachelNope, because the more I dug in, the more I was like, "Wait, this is actually kind of a big deal."

Speaker 3Hmm. Okay, I'm listening.

RachelI'm Max, by the way.

Speaker 3And I'm Rachel, and this is The Checkout Point.

RachelWhere we apparently get excited about filing forms now.

Speaker 3Speak for yourself. I've been excited about compliance since Amazon.

RachelOf course you have.

Speaker 3So what's the story that's sneaking up on everyone?

RachelA freight company just rolled out automated customs filings for shipments crossing into the EU.

Speaker 3Wait, before you tell me more, is this good news or bad news for sellers?

RachelDepends who you ask. For some folks, it's about to get a lot more annoying. For others, it's the excuse they needed to finally automate.

Speaker 3Interesting split. So depending on where you sit, this is either a headache or a shortcut.

RachelExactly. Same rollout, two totally different reactions.

Speaker 3That's it? That's the big reveal?

RachelThat's the surface. There's a reason it matters way more than it sounds.

Speaker 3Okay, now you're doing the thing where you tease and don't tell me.

RachelI'm absolutely doing that thing.

Speaker 3Fine, fine. What else is on deck?

RachelWe've got holiday season stuff coming, cross-border spend, BNPL, the whole TikTok Shop chaos.

Speaker 3Oh, that I actually wanna hear.

RachelAnd Spain apparently is having a moment in e-commerce.

Speaker 3Spain? Okay, didn't see that one coming.

RachelRight? But first, this customs filing thing.

Speaker 3The boring one.

RachelThe boring one that isn't boring, trust me.

Speaker 3I trust you, barely. Let's hear it.

RachelOkay, so picture this. You're a freight company, and your entire job just got a robot assistant for paperwork. Doesn't sound like a podcast moment, right?

Speaker 3Not exactly headline material, no.

RachelBut stick with me. There's a company called K&R International Services out of Michigan, and they just started using a system from Descartes to automate their EU customs filings.

Speaker 3Wait, filings for what exactly?

RachelSecurity filings. Specifically, the EU's Import Control System 2, ICS2 for short. K&R handles charter cargo carriers, the planes packed with e-commerce shipments, and every single one of those shipments needs paperwork before it lands.

Speaker 3So this is basically an automated customs form filler.

RachelKinda, yeah. A GlobeNewswire release from August 31st laid it out. Descartes standardizes the filings so K&R doesn't have to hand key each one.

Speaker 3Okay, walk me through what security filing actually means here, because that phrase could mean a dozen different things.

RachelFair. Basically, customs wants to know what's on a plane before it lands, who's shipping it, what it is, where it's going, so they can flag anything risky before it even touches the ground. That's the whole point of ICS2, advance data instead of finding out at the border.

Speaker 3So it's less fill out a form and more prove you know what's in every single box before the wheels touch down.

RachelExactly, and that's why doing it by hand doesn't scale. One person can't manually verify data on tens of thousands of individual parcels before a security window closes.

Speaker 3Okay, but why does a charter carrier suddenly need that? Like, planes have been landing in Europe for decades without a software company stepping in.

RachelRight, that's the question, and the scale is the tell. One charter flight can carry tens of thousands of individual parcels.

Speaker 3Tens of thousands on one plane?

RachelOne plane, and Descartes' system is sending hundreds of thousands of these filings to EU customs every single month.

Speaker 3Okay, hundreds of thousands a month is a lot of forms for something nobody's heard of.

RachelThat's the part that got me. This isn't a boutique fix for one weird shipment type. This is industrial scale paperwork.

Speaker 3So somebody at KR looked at their filing queue and said, "We cannot keep doing this by hand."

RachelBasically. The volume just outran whatever process they had before.

Speaker 3I mean, put yourself in their shoes for a second. If you've got tens of thousands of parcels on one flight and each one needs its own filing, what does that actually look like on the ground? Like, is somebody sitting there typing addresses into a form all night?

RachelPretty much. Before automation, somebody or a team of somebodies keying in shipment details one at a time, racing a clock, because these filings have to land inside a security window before the cargo arrives.

Speaker 3And if you miss that window?

RachelBest case, delays. Worst case, the shipment gets held or bounced back, and now you've got angry customers waiting on parcels that are stuck in some warehouse instead of under a tree.

Speaker 3Okay, that actually makes the boring framing kind of funny in hindsight. This is the difference between a package showing up and a package sitting in customs purgatory.

RachelRight, and that's why I think this is worth a whole segment instead of one line in a roundup, because it's not really about KR's internal workflow. It's about what happens when the entire model for getting stuff into Europe assumes you can process this much data by hand, and you just can't anymore.

Speaker 3So for a seller listening to this who's never heard of KR or Descartes, why should they care about one freight company's software vendor?

RachelBecause if you're shipping e-commerce orders into the EU on a carrier like this, your parcel is one of those tens of thousands riding on that plane. Whether it clears fast or gets stuck depends partly on whether your carrier's filing system can actually keep up with the volume.

Speaker 3So it's invisible to the seller until it isn't.

RachelExactly. Nobody emails you and says, "Hey, your carrier automated their ICS2 filings." You just notice your stuff clears faster, or you notice it doesn't.

Speaker 3That's kind of unsettling, honestly, when you think about how much of e-commerce runs on infrastructure nobody's actually looking at.

RachelRight. Most of the stuff that decides whether your holiday order shows up on time isn't glamorous, it's paperwork, security filings, systems quietly grinding away in the background.

Speaker 3Which honestly changes how I think about invisible infrastructure. It's not exciting, but it's the thing standing between a smooth delivery and a stuck one.

RachelRight. And nobody notices it until it breaks.

Speaker 3But hand-keying customs forms isn't new. Airlines and freight forwarders have dealt with EU paperwork forever. So why is scale suddenly the reason nobody can just keep doing it the old way?

RachelOkay, so give me the actual answer. Why does one charter carrier need this now?

Speaker 3Because it's not just charter carriers, Max. The EU is scrapping the €150 duty exemption.

RachelWait, the low-value exemption? The one that let cheap parcels skip customs?

Speaker 3That one, gone. A report from CHAMP Cargo Systems lays it out. On top of these stricter pre-arrival data rules, they're pulling the exemption for anything under €150.

RachelSo every $5 phone case from some marketplace seller now needs an actual customs declaration?

Speaker 3Every single one. No more, "Eh, it's cheap. Wave it through."

RachelThat's gonna break some spreadsheets. Yeah, a lot of them.

Speaker 3I mean, walk me through what that actually costs someone, like a small seller doing five bucks a unit. Filing a customs declaration for that isn't free.

RachelNo, and that's the rub. Even if the duty itself is basically nothing on a $5 item, someone still has to file the paperwork, which means labor or software or a customs broker taking a cut.

Speaker 3So the exemption wasn't really about the money owed, it was the process itself.

RachelRight. The process was the whole point. Once you strip that away, cheap doesn't mean simple anymore.

Speaker 3Yeah, that distinction is going to matter a lot to somebody's spreadsheet.

RachelIt already is, honestly.

Speaker 3Okay, but walk me through the mechanics, because stricter pre-arrival data rules is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

RachelRight. So this is the ICS2 piece, the security filing system KR's plugging Descartes into. It wants advanced data on basically everything crossing into the EU, and now it's paired with there's no more too small to matter category.

Speaker 3So the volume problem we were just talking about, that's not the whole story. It's the smaller half of it.

RachelIt's the smaller half, because charter cargo flights are one lane. Every low-value parcel from every online seller shipping into the EU is a much wider lane.

Speaker 3Hmm. And when does this actually land? Because regulations always have some fine print about timing.

RachelThey do, and this one's got layers. According to a guide from iCustoms, most of the transitional grace periods for ICS2 ended December 31st, 2025.

Speaker 3So already happened.

RachelAlready happened for most countries, but Latvia got extra room. Their derogation runs out May 31st, 2026.

Speaker 3Wait, one country gets five extra months?

RachelOne country gets five extra months. And then there's a second wave behind that. Croatia, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia don't have to be fully compliant for road and rail freight until June of 2026.

Speaker 3So it's not one deadline. It's like three deadlines staggered across the calendar depending where you're shipping through.

RachelExactly, and that's the part that trips people up. A seller might think, "Okay, we're compliant," and then realize their freight route runs through one of the countries still in the grace window, or worse, just came out of one.

Speaker 3Right. Because the rules aren't uniform even inside the EU.

RachelNot uniform at all, which honestly changes how I read the whole Descartes story.

Speaker 3Go on.

RachelIt's not really about one freight company automating paperwork for its own convenience. It's a company positioning itself for a compliance wave that's hitting way beyond charter cargo. Every low-value shipment, every seller, staggered rollout and all.

Speaker 3So the headline undersells it. This isn't a logistics vendor story, it's an every EU-bound parcel just got more expensive to move story.

RachelAnd it's not like sellers can just opt out either. If you want access to EU customers, this is the new cost of entry, full stop.

Speaker 3So what's actually available to help smaller sellers deal with this? Because not everyone can afford to build their own compliance system.

RachelThat's probably where more vendors like Descartes come in, not just for charter carriers, but as the compliance layer smaller operations lean on so they don't have to hire an in-house Customs team.

Speaker 3Makes sense. Outsource the paperwork problem the same way you'd outsource payments or fraud screening.

RachelThat's the read, and I'd bet most sellers shipping into Europe have no idea the exemption's gone.

Speaker 3They're going to find out at the worst possible time.

RachelWhich is basically always how these things go.

Speaker 3So if compliance costs are climbing right when the exemption disappears and the timeline's already staggered and confusing-

RachelThen the real question is whether anyone's actually ready for what's coming next.

Speaker 3Meaning?

RachelMeaning the holidays, Rachel. Peak season is right behind all of this, and peak season doesn't wait for a compliance rollout to sort itself out.

Speaker 3Oh, that's a fun collision. New filing requirements, no more duty exemption, and then the biggest shipping crunch of the year lands on top of it.

RachelRight on top of it. So how ready is anybody actually for that?

Speaker 3Honestly, some of this probably gets absorbed quietly by the bigger players. Bigger sellers will just add it to their existing customs relationships. It's the smaller operations running lean that are going to feel it first.

RachelWhich loops right back to the readiness question, doesn't it?

Speaker 3That's the number I want to look at next, because ready and compliant are not the same word.

RachelOkay, so numbers. You want numbers? I got numbers.

Speaker 3Always.

RachelOne in five dollars spent worldwide on Black Friday, Cyber Monday next year, cross-border, not domestic, not buy from the store down the street, cross-border.

Speaker 3Wait, one in five? Say that again.

RachelRoughly twenty percent of all Black Friday, Cyber Monday spending globally crossing a border to get there.

Speaker 3Okay, that's, that's a lot of parcels hitting exactly the customs mess we just spent ten minutes on.

RachelEcommerce Practical is the one putting that number out there, and yeah, it lines up a little too well with everything Rachel just laid out.

Speaker 3It's not a coincidence. It's a collision course.

RachelA collision course. Sure. Let's go with that.

Speaker 3I mean, think about the operational side for a second. If a fifth of holiday revenue is crossing a border, that's a fifth of your Q4 that now needs a customs declaration it didn't need last year.

RachelRight. That's the whole ICS2 smashing right into peak season.

Speaker 3Yeah.

RachelAnd that's before you even factor in returns. Cross-border returns have their own customs headache on the way back.

Speaker 3Oh, don't even get me started on reverse logistics during a compliance shakeup.

RachelSame source has another one: buy now, pay later. US holiday BNPL spend is expected to cross twenty-two billion dollars for the first time ever.

Speaker 3Twenty-two billion in BNPL just for the holidays.

RachelJust holidays. Yeah.

Speaker 3That's a lot of holiday cheer riding on borrowed money.

RachelWhen you put it like that, sure.

Speaker 3Okay, but what's the actual read on that? Because BNPL crossing a threshold sounds exciting until you ask who's paying for the default risk.

RachelI mean, that's the retailer's problem, not really ours today, but it tells you something. People are stretching their budgets thinner and thinner every season and still spending more.

Speaker 3Which combined that with cross-border fees and new customs paperwork, and somebody's margin is getting squeezed from both directions.

RachelBoth directions. Yeah.

Speaker 3Here's one for you. Amazon. Third-party sellers are expected to hold sixty percent or less of Amazon's Q4 units this year.

RachelWait, sixty percent or less? That's down, right?

Speaker 3That's the forecast. Yeah. The marketplace side losing share of the unit count to Amazon's own first party retail.

RachelHuh. I would have guessed third party just kept eating more and more of the pie every year.

Speaker 3That's been the story for a decade, so a dip, even a small one, is worth clocking. Sixty percent is still the majority, don't get me wrong, but the ceiling's not just going up anymore.

RachelOkay, so that's Amazon. Speaking of platforms nobody saw becoming five years ago.

Speaker 3TikTok Shop?

RachelTikTok Shop. Eighty-four percent sales growth March 2025 to February '26.

Speaker 3Eighty-four percent in under a year?

RachelYeah, and eMarketer is citing NielsenIQ data for that one. Then on top of the eighty-four percent growth, the holiday stretch alone, just November and December, pulled in over one point three billion dollars.

Speaker 3One point three billion in two months on an app people were scrolling for dance videos three years ago?

RachelI mean, come on. That's wild, right? Nobody's dancing anymore. They're checking out.

Speaker 3They're probably doing both. Probably.

RachelYeah.

Speaker 3Probably, yeah. Here's what strikes me about that TikTok Shop number, though. Eighty-four percent growth isn't just organic scrolling turning into buying. That kind of jump usually means sellers actively building storefronts there, not just hoping customers stumble onto a product video.

RachelRight. It's a deliberate channel now, not a side experiment, which means anyone still treating TikTok Shop as a nice to have is probably behind already.

Speaker 3But it does connect back to what we were just talking about. A new sales channel like that is also a new checkout, a new fulfillment path, a new set of parcels that might be crossing a border.

RachelRight. It's not separate from the customs story. It's stacked on top of it.

Speaker 3So you've got the duty change, the filing deadlines, cross-border spend climbing to a fifth of the holiday total, BNPL past twenty-two billion, and a platform like TikTok Shop pulling over a billion in two months, all landing in the same quarter?

RachelWhen you put it that way, it sounds like everyone's just praying nothing breaks.

Speaker 3Hope is not a supply chain strategy, Max.

RachelFair. Fair enough.

Speaker 3But look, everyone's gearing up for that one spike. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the holiday scramble, all eyes on six weeks in Q4.

RachelRight. That's the whole industry's heartbeat right now.

Speaker 3And that's fine, but some markets aren't waiting for a spike at all. They're just growing steadily month over month, all year. No seasonal fireworks required.

RachelOh, you're talking about... Wait, is this the Spain thing?

Speaker 3We'll get there, but that's the shift I want to make from can you survive the six-week crunch to who's actually building something that compounds the other forty-six weeks too.

RachelOkay, I like that because holiday readiness is one problem, but year-round growth is a completely different muscle.

Speaker 3Exactly. And there's at least one market doing both right now.

RachelShort pause.

Speaker 3Okay, so if you want an example of that steady non-seasonal growth I was talking about, Spain.

RachelSpain? All right, hit me.

Speaker 3E-commerce turnover there has multiplied by five point seven over the last decade. It's now past a hundred and fourteen point eight billion euros.

RachelWait, five point seven times in ten years?

Speaker 3Yep, and more than twenty-nine million people in Spain are shopping online now.

RachelThat's basically the whole adult population buying stuff on their phones.

Speaker 3Pretty much, and nobody's writing headlines about a Spain Black Friday spike. It's just compounding quarter after quarter.

RachelNo flashy sales event, just the number going up every year.

Speaker 3Right. Which is honestly the healthier version of growth if you're running the ops side.

RachelSteady is underrated, honestly. Nobody throws a parade for a chart that just goes up a little every month.

Speaker 3No parade, but way better sleep for whoever's running ops.

RachelIt makes me wonder what that steady curve actually requires operationally, though. Like, if you're not gearing up for one giant spike, are you just always slightly gearing up?

Speaker 3Basically, yeah. You don't get the luxury of scaling up for six weeks and coasting the rest of the year. Your fulfillment, your customer service, your checkout, all of it has to hold steady at a higher baseline every single week.

RachelThat actually sounds harder in some ways than surviving one crunch.

Speaker 3It is, in a way. There's no adrenaline spike to justify throwing extra staff at it for a month. You just have to build it right the first time.

RachelSpeaking of operations, I got a story that ties right into that. Sennheiser, the headphone company, just partnered with Pattern.

Speaker 3The marketplace accelerator?

RachelThat one. Sennheiser partnered with Pattern to boost its third-party seller performance on Amazon Australia specifically.

Speaker 3Why Australia?

RachelThe announcement frames it as fixing visibility, like actually seeing what's happening across their marketplace listings, and using AI-driven insights to clean up the operational side.

Speaker 3So it's not about ad spend, it's about the plumbing.

RachelExactly. Making sure the third-party listings aren't quietly bleeding sales because of stuff nobody's watching.

Speaker 3That's the unsexy part of e-commerce nobody wants to talk about at a dinner party.

RachelRight. Nobody's bragging about their listing hygiene at a barbecue.

Speaker 3But it's the difference between converting and not.

RachelTotally. And that Sennheiser move, it's a small partnership, but it's basically betting that operational fixes move more revenue than another marketing push would.

Speaker 3Which, if you've ever managed a P&L, is almost always the boring, correct answer.

RachelSee, this is why I love talking to you. You find the boring, correct answer thrilling.

Speaker 3It's called being right, Max.

RachelFair enough. So here's the piece that actually connects Spain's boom and Sennheiser's fix, though. There's a writer at Inside Retail Australia who coined this term, the functionality gap.

Speaker 3Functionality gap. Okay, define it.

RachelIt's the distance between something technically working and it working the way a customer actually expects it to.

Speaker 3So the site loads, Checkout completes, order confirms.

RachelBut the tracking's wrong, or the return process is a maze, or the item shows up two weeks late without warning. Technically it worked. Experientially, it didn't.

Speaker 3That's such a clean way to put a thing everyone's felt and nobody names.

RachelRight? And that's the whole thread for this episode, honestly. Because think about it. Spain's got twenty-nine million people ready to buy. Sennheiser's fixing the plumbing so those buyers actually convert on a marketplace. And underneath both of those, you've got this Functionality gap sitting there waiting to eat your growth if the experience doesn't hold up.

Speaker 3So the growth story and the compliance story we opened with, they're the same problem wearing different clothes.

RachelThat's the converse rate nerd in me talking, but yeah. You can have the best CRO funnel in the world, and if the parcel gets stuck at Customs or the return process is garbage, none of that matters. The number on the dashboard doesn't care why the customer's angry.

Speaker 3It's the same lesson from three different angles this week. Filing paperwork, holiday BNPL numbers, Spain's growth curve. They're all just checkout and fulfillment experience wearing different outfits.

RachelDifferent outfits, same body.

Speaker 3And honestly, none of this needed a household name behind it. KR isn't a brand anyone's heard of. Sennheiser's fix is a quiet back-end partnership. Spain's growth curve isn't a single viral moment. It's all just infrastructure work paying off slowly.

RachelWhich is maybe the most useful takeaway of the whole week. The boring stuff is usually the stuff that actually decides who wins.

Speaker 3All right. I think that's actually a decent place to leave sellers with something to chew on this week.

RachelYeah?

Speaker 3The takeaway isn't complicated. Get your compliance sorted before Q4 lands on you, and don't celebrate a growth market until you've actually stress tested the experience behind it.

RachelGrowth without readiness is just a bigger mess waiting to happen.

Speaker 3Exactly. So let's wrap the week up. So look, we already landed on the takeaway back there. Compliance sorted before Q4. Experience stress tested before you chase a growth market. That's the whole homework assignment in one line.

RachelShort, sweet, and correct. I like it.

Speaker 3If there's one thing I'd add, it's this: pick one shipment lane or one growth market and actually audit it this week instead of nodding along and doing nothing.

RachelOne lane, not the whole map. That feels doable.

Speaker 3Exactly. Small, specific, actually finished beats big and vague and abandoned by Thursday.

RachelI'm stealing that line for our next planning meeting.

Speaker 3Steal away. And honestly, if you only take one thing from this whole episode, let it be that the boring infrastructure work is the stuff that actually protects your Q4, not the flashy campaign you were about to green light instead.

RachelBoring, but bulletproof. I'm putting that on a shirt.

Speaker 3That's the week.

RachelOkay, my turn. You know what customs officials and my kids have in common?

Speaker 3Oh, no.

RachelThey both go through your bags and ask way too many questions before letting anything through.

Speaker 3Oh, that was rough, Max.

RachelI'll take it. All right. If you liked this one, follow the show so you don't miss next week. We'll have more on how this all shakes out heading into the holidays.

Speaker 3Definitely worth sticking around for.

RachelFor sure. Alright. That's it for us this week.

Speaker 3I'm Rachel.

RachelAnd I'm Max.

Speaker 3This has been The Checkout Point, powered by Blickit.co.

RachelSee you next week.