Well, mess is a rather tame word for this, to be honest, but... we'll leave it at that for now.
I have promised you more about the shipping issues that many small vendors currently face, so here you go.
First of all, because most German social media posts about these problems currently are full of comments bashing the EU. (Notice that I write comments - it's not the posts themselves.) Personally, I do stand very firmly behind the idea of the EU. We are stronger together, and many, many of the things the EU does are really wonderful. I am also old enough to still remember the hassle of border controls, and the constant maths in your head of trying to do currency exchange calculations while shopping for coffee or food or souvenirs, and the problems of ordering something from a small shop outside your own country, with different currency and all. Joining up under an umbrella that helps us to negotiate better with other large nations like China and the US, and making things within the EU simpler and more harmonised - that's a great idea. Unfortunately all great ideas struggle with small-mindedness, and may also struggle with egoism, and that is surely part of why some things, intended for the very best, go horribly pear-shaped and suddenly find themselves rather brown in colour and on a rapid trajectory towards the next fan.
I am also all, all for the reduction of waste and environmental impact. If you've been hanging out on this blog for a while, you will know that sustainability and reducing unneccessary waste are quite high up on my personal list. We have numbers for the EU (well, for the whole world, but anyways), and packaging waste (especially single-use plastics) are a huge portion of general waste, so it is important to act in this respect. Whcich means... in general, the EU idea of unifying waste and packaging material treatments across all countries, and sequentially introducing more rules for better sustainability - it's great, and very, very necessary.
So where did things go wrong? Previously, we had different rules for each of the EU countries, with different thresholds for import, different costs for package waste licensing, different minimum amounts for that. Quite a few countries had a de minimis threshold, so you'd not need to bother registering for a handful of packages each year. We are talking literal handfuls here; like many other small sole traders, I am not sending more than at super-duper-most five packages per year to any one single other EU country*.
All these countries had established their own systems, and they are vastly different from nation to nation. Obviously, all countries were somehow convinced that their system is the bees' knees, and did not want to change it or adopt anyone else's instead. So, consequently, there was no agreement on new, EU-wide regulations. The only thing that happened was that there are the same labels in all of the EU now, and each country now works on the same baseline: They still have their national waste licensing system, and you are still required to enter it if you ship to that country, but there are no more thresholds with the intention to offer the same terms everywhere and to everyone. That, unfortunately, means that you have to register via a licensed, notary-confirmed authorised representative in each single of the 26 countries if you intend to offer selling into that country, and this starts at the very first package. And with this harmonised, they have not even agreed on the same fee structure or waste amount tiers, which means that one country you might have to register and it's a minimum amount of 100 kg of paper you pay for, and in another one it might be 30 kg.
If I could be sure to have a shipping volume of around 250 packages per year into any single country, I could add around 3 Euro to the cost in every shipping tier, and it would work out approximately (if the licensing fees are not too high in that country, that is). With less shipping volume, it's not even worth doing the maths for that country.
The EU has planned some exemptions for small vendors, but their definition of a "small company" is one with less than ten employees and less than two million Euro turnover per year. They have been told, time and again and not just within the last few days, that these rules are way, way too much bureaucracy and way too much expenses for small traders. However, nothing has happened. Which means that the really small vendors, the solo entrepreneurs and similar tiny ones (in German you'd say we are a fly's shit), we're getting grouped in with companies just below two million turnover per year. This, dear reader, cannot work well, as anyone knowing and doing a little bit of simple maths will be easily able to understand.
Unfortunately, and this is where I do get a bit grudgy now, the EU representatives were not even able to agree among them all on a really ridiculously low de minimis threshold. There's always be going to be malcontent people where they are just above a minimum line, but really, if we're talking about amounts that an ambitious granny could post to her family each year - even if it's only ten parcels free to other countries each year, that would already help the really small ones.
Because, and here's the next bit of irony: Many of the small traders whose statements I've read do say that they are happy and support the general idea of waste control and waste management. They are also trying to comply with the rules as best they can** - so consequently they are stopping shipping. Some are already very frustrated about all the rules and regs that, for instance, make it harder to re-use packaging materials on top of all the other stuff that you have to keep up-to-date with. Quite a few of them are holding a grudge, but I have not seen any of them state we need to leave the EU. That is done in the comments by some readers, mostly of the right-leaning-maybe-already-brownish tinged fraction that really have no understanding of how shitty that would be overall, and have obviously also not paid attention to what Brexit has turned out to be. (Spoiler alert: It has turned out to not have been a good idea.)
So where am I going with this text, apart from getting it all off my chest? One, hopefully you can understand a little better now why so many shops have stopped EU shipping. We fly-shit traders really want to have nice, fair rules that we can adhere to, and can't use more insecurities because of grey zones. Two, if you are unhappy about the situation (which I very much hope you will be), you have some options: Write to your EU representative(s), or call them up if you like phone calls better. Write to the EU commissioner Jessika Roswall. Leave a statement in the official feedback page (it has opened August 6 and will be open until September 10). Sign the (new) petition about this mishap. Tell your friends. And then... please do something that makes you happy, to balance out all this shit.
I can tell you that I have spent much, much more of my time and energy on this whole kerfuffle than was good for me. I have hoped against hope that I'd get heard along with all the other tiny shops. I have read the texts of the regulations, in English and in German, trying to find the exemption for the small ones. I have cried with frustration of having so, so many things that it is really hard to conform to, and you know that you are in a grey zone here, and there, and there, and there, and at some point it adds up and you lose the energy to keep up when the next one comes up where there's just no way around. There's also the little issue that many of the people I work with, and am getting goods from - both for the shop stock and for my museum work - are in some other EU country, and most probably they, now, are also stopping shipment within the EU. Something like the Alpirsbach hose project? The fabric came from Sweden - so nope (or add another c 500 € to the cost of the fabric). My dyeing expert? Lives in France. Some of my spindle whorls? From Belgium. If I have a regional source, I'll go for that, but many things are so niche that I'm over the moon if I can find anyone at all willing to do these things, and chances that they're outside Germany are very, very high.
I am not sure what is to blame for this all going so utterly and senselessly wrong, but I am sure that it's something profoundly human (but maybe not very good-human) that is part of all this.
Having to stop shipping to UK because of Brexit, and to the US because of taxes and tariffs was frustrating already. Having to stop on what I had considered, more or less, the home turf hits much harder, and differently. So for now, I will let this thing rest, and hope that it will resolve itself in some way. If it doesn't do it quickly and you need something shipped from me, or from any other small vendor in a different country, your best bet will probably be to find a friend who lives in that country, and do the ordering and shipping via them.
Good luck, to all of us.
* At this volume, shipping abroad is basically customer service, and if calculated properly, I guess the work time invested overall in keeping up to date with shipping cost changes and shipping rule changes, plus the extra filling out of import forms probably more than eats up the revenue gained with these shipments - but I enjoy having my stuff travel the world, and I know the pain of not being able to get something just because you're too far away, so I have never done the maths on that correctly, on purpose.
** It is, in fact, no small feat to even just keep up with the developments so you know what you have to change, or check, or amend, or look out for. There is no official channel that will give the stuff to you in somewhat digestible form - so you can either spend a lot of time trawling the EU and national rules pages, or hope that you're lucky and will hear about it in time, or sign up to some "vendor help" newsletters that will give you most of the news at some point, but always in a way to make you feel like buying some programme or service from them is your only sensible way to deal with the new shit. If you're a 200 employees company, you'll have someone dealing with all the law stuff and compliance shenanigans. If you're just one person... every hour that this research and the consequent adaptations for compliance eat up is time that you can't spend on your core business. And believe me, it's not done with one hour per change usually.