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by shivasaxena 319 days ago
ah, what's the 12.50€ processing fee? Is it the DHL processing fees?

> But now I need to warehouse those 1000 items in Germany and re-package them into local parcels for each customer

Yes, it would be infeasible to ship such a low value good. Even on Temu I have to order a minimum of 29€. If you account for that, you should be able to see how a 10€ markup by esselunga/carrefour on imported price of 2.2€ is outrageous and reeks of lack of competition.

> Calculating in that I might have to deal with 10% returns, I need to charge 9€ per piece. And here's the kicker: If Temu would legally pay customs and deal with warranty and returns accoring to German law, they, too, would arrive at a similar price.

Temu now pays customs since the 150€ customs exemption has been gone for years now, and more importantly also the same VAT as your domestic retailer! So the 2€ price for the wine-opener I gave you includes customs and VAT.

For example my order of a few months ago of 38€ included a VAT of 6,09€

I hope you can see my point now that all this outrage against Temu/Shein is based on trumpian style misinformation about VAT and customs and a general "chinese bad, temu bad, we good" attitude which I personally find defeatist and embarrassing.

If we were to spend a fraction of this outrage on how bad our logistics and supply chains are for domestic producers(specially in DE: I used to work in retail dealing with EDI systems of EDEKA/REWE and domestic suppliers) we would be doing some thing productive.

Not to mention things like regulating/fining anti-competitive behaviour by GS1 and others.