Anyone selling to EU consumers from outside the Union has spent 2026 watching four separate legal regimes move at once — VAT, customs duties, product safety, and product liability — each on its own calendar, none of them synchronised with the others.
Rather than write another single-topic article, I’ve put together a reading grid: Who Owes What: The EU’s 2026 Rulebook for Low-Value Imports.
It answers one question directly, for each regime and each sales channel: at any given moment, who is actually on the hook — the seller, the marketplace, or an EU-based representative? That includes the VAT Directive’s deemed-supplier rule, the €3 transitional customs duty and the recast Union Customs Code still awaiting its Parliament vote, the General Product Safety Regulation, the leaked draft European Product Act, and the Product Liability Directive.
Two of the texts it covers aren’t settled law yet, and the grid says so explicitly rather than treating them as done deals. It’s built as a living reference rather than a dated article — I’ll update it as the Union Customs Code clears the Official Journal and the European Product Act moves from leaked draft to formal proposal.