Shein Faces Sales Slump with 8% Drop Following Minimis Policy End in the US

Shein, punished in the United States. The Asian e-commerce platform’s sales in the U.S. have recorded a first drop after the U.S. government officially ended the legal exemption known as minimis. This loophole, which allowed low-value packages to enter the country tax-free, particularly benefited operators such as Shein, which in turn could face the same restriction in other countries.

According to data compiled by Bloomberg, Shein’s U.S. sales posted a year-on-year drop of 8% in September. The figure, which has recorded the evolution of U.S. orders in the first month since the loophole was finally closed on August 29, is the second worst performance of the company’s U.S. sales in the last three years, according to the same media.

Although the White House has become one of the first governments to put an end to this tax exemption, the idea has already spread to other countries, mainly in Europe, which are seeking to increase the competitiveness of national companies in the face of the low prices of Asian operators. For the time being, both the United Kingdom and some of the major European Union economies have publicly expressed their plans to eliminate this allowance.

Since the end of August, Shein has had to pay taxes on the packages it brings into the country.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the French government proposed in April that the European Union implement a temporary border tax to finance the handling of low-value packages within the continent, with the aim of finding a solution until the EU executive eliminates the exemption definitively.

This decision is a setback for Shein, as well as other similar Asian operators such as Temu, which until now had benefited from the tax exemption to grow rapidly in the international market. Now, however, under the new U.S. customs scheme, all packages entering the country, regardless of their country of origin or value, must be processed by the U.S. Customs Office, have a customs declaration and be subject to taxation.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, U.S. Customs authorities processed more than 1.3 billion packages subject to this exemption in 2024 alone. The number has multiplied in tandem with the rise of e-commerce, especially ultra-fast fashion, and at the end of last year an average of four million packages a day were entering the country, up from 2.8 million the previous year.