European consumers spent 55.1 billion euros online with stores outside the European Union in 2025, and 49.7 billion euros of it went to Temu, Shein and AliExpress. That is 90.2 percent of everything that left the bloc, according to a new market-intelligence estimate from ECDB. ECDB has not published the underlying dataset, sample or method in a form that can be checked, so treat every figure here as an estimate rather than an official statistic.
The figure matters less as a statement about three Chinese platforms than as a measurement of a flow that European policy has been arguing about for two years without a price tag attached to it. There is one now, and it is the number every customs and parcel measure between here and 2028 is pointed at.
What the 90.2 percent actually counts
The denominator is narrow, and getting it right changes how big the number feels. ECDB is measuring online spending by EU consumers that went to stores based outside the EU, on physical goods. That cross-border flow was 55.1 billion euros. It is not total European e-commerce, and it is not the share of a European shopper’s basket.
Set against all online spending by consumers in EU countries, the outbound flow is 13.1 percent. The other 86.9 percent stayed with stores based inside the European Union. So nine euros in ten of the money that crosses the border goes to three apps, while roughly seven euros in eight of all online spending never crosses the border at all.
Both readings are true and they point in opposite directions. The leak is highly concentrated and it is also, so far, a minority of the market.
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Everything else is a rounding error
After the three Chinese platforms, the rest of the world barely registers. The United States received 4.8 percent of the outbound spend and the United Kingdom 4.6 percent. Those two together are roughly a tenth of what the three apps took, which is the part of this that should unsettle a European brand more than the headline.
It means there is no diversified field of foreign competitors taking European consumer money. There is one channel, built on low prices and direct shipment from China, and a long tail close to nothing. A European seller losing a sale across the border is losing it to the same three destinations almost every time.
The trade goes one way
The same report measures the reverse direction, and the asymmetry is the most useful thing in it. Online stores based in the EU sold 3.9 billion euros to consumers outside the EU. Half of those consumers, 51 percent, were in Switzerland.
So 55.1 billion euros of European consumer spending goes out and 3.9 billion euros of non-European consumer spending comes in, a ratio of roughly fourteen to one. The single largest foreign market for EU online stores is the country immediately next door, which shares two of the bloc’s languages and sits inside its logistics network. That is not a cross-border export business. It is domestic selling with a short overspill.
Why this is the number under the customs fight
The European Commission has already moved against this flow twice. From 1 July 2026 the EU abolished the 150 euro de minimis exemption and imposed a temporary 3 euro customs duty on items bought online. A Union handling fee on small parcels follows by 1 November 2026 on goods imported into the EU, and the Commission states it will determine the amount in a delegated act. The amount is not yet set.
The reform also moves the liability. Responsibility for duty payment and compliance, in the Commission’s own wording, “is no longer with the consumer but with the platforms, sellers or carriers involved in the transactions”. That is the structural change, and it is aimed squarely at a flow whose size has now been measured.
A flat per-item charge is regressive against order value, so it falls hardest on low-priced goods shipped individually, which is the shape of most of the 49.7 billion euros. Whether that dents the flow depends on how much of this volume now ships from stock already inside the EU rather than direct from China, and that split is not published anywhere.
What the figure does not break down
There is no category split. The 49.7 billion euros covers physical goods as a whole. A brand in home textiles and a brand in industrial spares are both inside this number and only one of them is actually competing with it.
There is no split between the three platforms either, and they are not the same business. Shein is a fashion vertical with its own supply chain, AliExpress is a marketplace with a long seller tail, and Temu sits between the two. Treating them as one competitor is convenient for a headline and useless for a pricing decision. Nor is there a country breakdown of the outbound side, so there is no way to tell whether the leak is evenly spread or concentrated in the markets with the weakest domestic marketplaces. No independent measurement of this flow is published alongside ECDB’s.
For the business operator
Use the 13.1 percent, not the 90.2 percent, when you are sizing the threat. The concentrated figure describes who takes the border-crossing money; the smaller one describes how much of your market actually crosses the border. A plan built on the first number will overstate the problem and a plan that ignores the second will miss where it is growing.
Check your own category rather than the aggregate. If your products sit outside the price band that these three platforms compete in, this number is context and not competition, and treating it as competition will push you into a price war you do not need to fight.
Put the 1 November handling fee in the forecast now, with the amount blank. The date is fixed, the liability shift to platforms, sellers and carriers is already in force, and the only open variable is the figure. A model that cannot absorb a per-item charge of unknown size is a model that will need rebuilding in November rather than this month.
From the consumer’s side
Nobody in Lisbon or Lodz experiences this as buying from abroad. The apps are in the local language, the price is in the local currency, and until this year the duty question never appeared at checkout. The border was invisible, which is exactly why the flow reached 55.1 billion euros without anyone describing it as importing.
That is what changes next. A per-item duty and a handling fee make the border visible at the moment of purchase, and the shopper most likely to notice is the one buying a cheap item, because the charge is a larger share of a small basket. The behavioural response to a fixed fee is a bigger basket, not a different shop, so the first thing to expect is consolidation of orders rather than a return to domestic sellers.
The three-line version
If you run pricing or the category plan, separate the two numbers before you act on either: 90.2 percent of what leaves the EU goes to three apps, and only 13.1 percent of EU online spending leaves at all. The line to take upward is that the leak is concentrated but bounded, and the bound is the part that gets left out of the retelling.
If you have just taken on European commercial strategy, the gap this exposes is the export side. European online stores sold 3.9 billion euros outside the bloc and half of that was Switzerland. If your plan has a cross-border growth line in it, this says the sector as a whole has not managed one.
If you sign the budget, there is nothing to buy here. This is a 2025 measurement published against a cost base that changes on 1 November, with the fee amount still unset. Refuse any proposal that uses the 90.2 percent as a reason to cut prices, because the figure describes a flow and not your category.
Sources
Ecommerce News Europe, Over 90% of purchases abroad made on Temu, Shein or AliExpress: https://ecommercenews.eu/over-90-of-purchases-abroad-made-on-temu-shein-or-aliexpress/
European Commission, DG Taxation and Customs Union, EU customs reform: https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/customs/eu-customs-reform_en