TL;DR
On July 1, 2026 the EU abolished its de minimis customs duty relief. Consignments valued at €150 or under now carry a temporary €3 duty per tariff line, a regime expected to run until July 1, 2028. If you sell into the EU or buy from outside it, the practical consequence is not really the €3. It's that every small parcel now generates paperwork — a duty line, a tariff classification, a customs value — and that paperwork is scattered across marketplace order pages, email confirmations, HTML invoices, and CSV exports that live in six different places.
Convert: Anything to PDF turns that mess into a dated, filed, per-period PDF trail: CSV order exports become auto-formatted tables, local HTML invoices become PDFs, and a month of mixed files merges into one document. It runs entirely inside your browser — nothing uploads.
Two things up front, because they matter more than our pitch. First: where your platform or carrier gives you an official commercial invoice or customs document, use that one. It's the authoritative record. Ours is a dated snapshot for your own books, not a substitute. Second: we are not tax advisors and this is not customs advice. Talk to your accountant. Seriously — this post is about filing, not about what you owe.
What actually changed
For years, low-value consignments entering the EU got duty relief below a threshold. As of July 1, 2026, that relief is gone, replaced in the interim by a flat €3 duty per tariff line on consignments at or under €150. The temporary arrangement is expected to run to July 1, 2028.
The scale is the story. 4.6 billion small parcels entered the EU in 2024. That is the volume of shipments that previously sailed under the threshold and now doesn't. Whatever you think about the policy, the administrative footprint just went from "rounding error" to "every single order."
This isn't an isolated move, either. The US already went first: the Section 321 $800 de minimis threshold died on August 29, 2025. The direction of travel on both sides of the Atlantic is the same — the small-parcel exemption that quietly underwrote a decade of cross-border direct-to-consumer commerce is being closed.
Nine days later, Shopify moved
On July 10, 2026, Shopify shipped duties-inclusive pricing for Managed Markets — duties, import taxes, and cross-border fees folded directly into product prices, rather than sprung on the buyer at checkout or, worse, at the door.
That's a sensible product response to a real problem: nobody likes a surprise customs bill from a courier. But note what it does to your records. When duty is folded into the price, the €12 line item on the customer's receipt is no longer just the product. It's the product plus duty plus fees, blended. The breakdown still exists — it's just no longer sitting on the face of the document your customer sees. Which means the burden of being able to reconstruct it later shifts squarely onto your own record-keeping.
Why this is a filing problem, not just a tax problem
Here's the thing that catches small sellers out. Duty itself is a number your accountant or your platform calculates. Fine. But the evidence that supports that number is a document trail, and if you get audited — or your customer disputes a charge, or a carrier misclassifies something, or you need to claim a refund — you need to produce it.
For any given sub-€150 order, the trail that suddenly matters looks like this:
| Record | Why it matters now | Where it usually lives |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial invoice | The authoritative customs document | Carrier or platform portal — use theirs |
| Duty breakdown | What was charged and on what basis | Order page, or blended into price post-Jul-10 |
| Tariff line / classification | Determines the €3-per-line arithmetic | Shipping label data, carrier portal, your own product data |
| Customs value | The declared basis | Invoice, order export |
| Price at time of order | Prices change; the record must not | Nowhere durable — this is the gap |
| Proof of delivery / import date | Which period it lands in | Carrier tracking page |
Look at the last two rows. Those are the ones that quietly go missing.
Price at time of order is the sharpest example. Your storefront price today is not your price from March. A marketplace order page can re-render with current data. A "view order" link can expire, or the listing can be deleted, or the whole shop can migrate platforms. The number you need for a March consignment is the March number, and the March number needs to exist somewhere that isn't a live web page you don't control.
A dated PDF snapshot is a boring, unglamorous fix for that. It's also the correct one.
The honest boundary: official documents vs. your own records
We're going to be blunt here because it's the whole brand.
If your platform, marketplace, or carrier gives you an official commercial invoice, customs declaration, or duty receipt — download that. It is the authoritative record. It carries whatever identifiers, signatures, or reference numbers the authorities actually want to see. Nothing we produce replaces it, and any tool that implies otherwise is doing you harm.
What we're good for is everything that has no official document, which turns out to be most of the trail:
- The marketplace order page that shows the duty line but has no "download invoice" button.
- The CSV export from your store, which is data but not a document.
- The HTML invoice your platform emails you or drops in a folder.
- The supplier confirmation, the tracking page, the fee breakdown.
- The whole month, gathered in one place, so your accountant doesn't have to assemble it from your inbox.
Our output is a dated snapshot for your records. That's a real, useful thing. It is not a legally-valid customs document and we're not going to pretend it is. Our broader take on what deserves archiving and what doesn't is in records retention: which webpages to archive as PDF.
The workflows
CSV order export to a formatted table PDF
This is the backbone. Every store platform exports orders as CSV. That CSV is the source of truth for what you sold, when, at what price, to where.
Drop it into the extension and it renders as an auto-formatted table — a real typeset table, not a screenshot of a spreadsheet, with selectable text you can search later.
And the detail that matters for exactly this use case: at 6 or more columns, it automatically switches to landscape. A customs-relevant order export has order ID, date, destination country, product, declared value, tariff line, and duty charged. That's seven columns. It flips to landscape on its own and stays readable. You didn't configure anything.
If your orders live in Excel, export to CSV first — .xlsx isn't supported directly. One menu click. More on making these tables presentable in CSV to PDF: board-ready tables.
Local HTML invoices to PDF
Loads of platforms hand you invoices as HTML — either emailed, or sitting in a folder after a bulk export. HTML is fine for viewing and terrible for filing: it can reference external stylesheets, render differently later, and generally refuses to be a stable artifact.
Convert local HTML files straight to PDF and the document stops moving. The local HTML to PDF guide covers the mechanics.
The active order page, when there's no invoice button
Some marketplace order pages simply have no downloadable invoice. The duty breakdown is right there on screen and there is no way to get it out except to screenshot it, which gives you an unsearchable image.
Convert the active web page to PDF instead. You get real, selectable text you can search two years from now when you're looking for one order ID among four hundred.
If the page is behind a login — which order pages invariably are — that's fine, and it's worth knowing that our sibling extension Convert: Web to PDF specialises in exactly this. It uses your already-authenticated session, so anything you can see in your browser, you can save. We wrote that up in saving webpages behind logins as PDF.
Merge a month into one PDF per period
This is where it stops being a chore and starts being a system.
At the end of each month, gather the mixed pile — the CSV export, the HTML invoices, the order-page PDFs, a couple of JPG photos of a physical customs form, a Markdown note explaining anything weird — and merge them into one PDF, in listed order. There's no merge limit beyond your machine's memory.
A suggested order that your accountant will thank you for:
00-summary.md— a short Markdown note: period, order count, total duty, anything anomalous.01-orders.csv— the full order export as a landscape table.02-invoices/— the HTML invoices, converted, in order-ID sequence.03-order-pages/— the pages that had no invoice.04-official/— anything official from the carrier goes in as-is.
One file per month. Named 2026-07-eu-duty.pdf. Filed. Done. The merge guide walks through the drag-and-drop mechanics.
Who in your shop can even see the tax documents?
Here's a wrinkle worth pausing on. On July 7, 2026, Shopify added four new granular staff permissions: payment settings, disputes, payouts, and tax documents. (Alongside a POS selling-environment health panel.)
That's a genuinely good change and it's also a question you should now ask yourself: who on your team can actually reach the customs and tax paperwork?
Because the answer used to be "whoever has admin," and the answer going forward should be "the specific people who need it." Granular permissions are a security win. They are also, if you're not paying attention, a way to discover in October that the seasonal contractor who had access in March is gone, along with their ability to help you find anything.
This cuts both ways for archiving:
- Good: locking down who can see tax docs reduces your exposure. Fewer people with access to customs values and payout data is straightforwardly safer.
- Watch out: if only one person can see the tax documents, and your archive is "it's in the portal," then your archive has a single point of failure wearing shoes.
A monthly PDF, stored where your finance function can actually reach it, decouples "who has portal permissions this quarter" from "can we produce records if asked." Those should not be the same question.
Why local matters here specifically
Look at what's in these files. Customer names and addresses. Order values. Payout data. Tariff classifications that reveal your supply chain. Margins, if anyone bothers to do the arithmetic.
The default move is to drag it into Smallpdf or iLovePDF or CloudConvert. They work. They're not scams. But they all share the same architecture: your file goes to a server you don't control, sits under a retention policy you didn't read, on infrastructure that could have a bad week.
Uploading your entire EU customer list to a free web tool to turn it into a table is a data transfer. It might be one you'd struggle to justify if someone asked you to document it. And the alternative isn't harder — it's a browser extension that does the same job with zero network requests during file conversion. The files never leave the machine. There's nothing to breach, no retention policy to read, no third party in the chain.
| Convert: Anything to PDF | Smallpdf / iLovePDF | CloudConvert | Adobe Acrobat | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer data leaves your machine | No | Yes | Yes | Depends |
| Cost | Free | Freemium | Freemium | Subscription |
| Watermark on free tier | None | Sometimes | Varies | N/A |
| CSV to formatted table | Yes, auto-landscape at 6+ cols | Limited | Varies | Manual |
| Merge mixed formats | Yes, no limit | Paid tiers | Yes | Yes |
| Account required | No | Usually | Usually | Yes |
That's the argument. It isn't complicated.
A realistic monthly routine
Fifteen minutes, once a month:
- Export orders to CSV from your platform. Include destination country, declared value, and duty if the export offers it.
- Download every official invoice the platform or carrier provides. These are authoritative — they go in the folder as-is.
- Catch the gaps. Any order with a duty line but no downloadable invoice: open the order page, convert it to PDF.
- Convert the CSV. Six-plus columns flips to landscape automatically.
- Write a two-line Markdown summary. Period, totals, anything odd. Your future self will read this and nothing else.
- Merge in order. Name it by period. File it.
That's it. The trick is that it's the same six steps every month, which is what makes it survive contact with a busy quarter. A system you'll actually run beats a better system you won't. We made the same argument for the receipts side in saving online receipts as PDF.
Frequently asked questions
Does a PDF I made count as an official customs document?
No, and please don't treat it as one. Where the platform or carrier issues an official commercial invoice or customs declaration, that is the authoritative record — download it and keep it. What we produce is a dated snapshot for your own books: useful for reconstructing what happened, reconciling with your accountant, and answering questions quickly. Not a substitute for the real document.
Do I owe €3 on every parcel now?
We genuinely can't tell you. The temporary regime is €3 per tariff line on consignments at or under €150, expected to run to July 1, 2028 — but how that lands on your specific goods, your specific classifications, and your specific business is a question for your accountant or a customs broker. We are not tax advisors and this is not customs advice. We make a PDF converter. Please talk to a professional.
What about the US? Is this the same thing?
Related, not identical. The US Section 321 $800 de minimis threshold was already eliminated on August 29, 2025 — the EU is now following the same direction. Different rules, different regimes, same filing consequence: the small-parcel paperwork exemption is over on both sides.
My platform folds duties into the price now. Do I still need records?
Arguably more. Shopify's duties-inclusive pricing for Managed Markets (July 10, 2026) blends duties, import taxes, and cross-border fees into the product price. That's better for the buyer, but it means the customer-facing document no longer shows the breakdown on its face. Your ability to reconstruct it later depends entirely on your own records.
Can it convert my Excel order export?
Not directly — .xlsx isn't supported. Export to CSV first, which is one menu click in any spreadsheet app. Then you get the auto-formatted table with the 6+ column landscape switch.
What if my invoice PDF is password-protected?
We can't read password-protected or encrypted source files. If the carrier sends a locked PDF, keep it as-is — it's already a PDF, and it's already the official document. Nothing to convert.
Is it really free, or is this a trial?
Free. No account, no watermark, no file size limit, no conversion cap. Free is a feature, not a funnel.
Bottom line
The EU's de minimis relief ended on July 1, 2026, with a temporary €3 per tariff line on consignments at or under €150 running to an expected July 1, 2028. Against a backdrop of 4.6 billion small parcels a year, the real cost to a small seller isn't the €3. It's that a document trail which used to be optional is now the thing that saves you in an audit, a dispute, or a refund claim.
Use the official invoice wherever one exists. For everything else — the CSV exports, the HTML invoices, the order pages with no download button — build a dated snapshot and merge it into one PDF per period. Convert: Anything to PDF does it locally, for free, without your customer list ever touching someone else's server.
And then go talk to your accountant, because we make a PDF converter and they do customs.