Gadget shopping in China…is dead (#R7F1)

ICYMI: Some bullshit commission inside the EU has found that shops outside of the EU do not have to deal with the full force of European bullshit bureaucracy and have therefore a significant advantage over EU vendors – and therefore need to be punished to level the field. And to facilitate that, they implemented a 3€ customs fee for imported goods – starting July 1st, 2026. The fee applies to all parcels below a value 150€ (we had fees and taxes for those already in place before that), and to be specific, applies to every group of goods that have a distinct tariff number.

…and with that, ladies and gentlemen, the EU killed gadget shopping in China – for now.

Thing is: There is no local market in place that just takes over, now that it has a 3€/piece advantage. Basically every seller that already has some Aliexpress-like range of goods is just a dropshipper that buys from Aliexpress/Alibaba, and pockets some cash for being present on a different platform. There is no shop that sells bits and pieces at an even remotely competitive price, nor is there a shop that has an even remotely broad offering of products. And especially there’s no shop that combines both.

To clarify: This 3€ fee applies to the long long list of HS codes. Silly example from work (the other day): Buying two different motors from an Aliexpress seller can easily get you a 6€ punishment fee instead of 3€. After all, there’s no “motors of all sorts” category – it’s finely divided of course, because $bureaucracy. There’s 85011093 (“AC motors of an output <= 37,5 W (excl. synchronous motors of an output <= 18 W)"), there's 85011099 (DC motors of an output <= 37,5 W), there's 85011010 ("Synchronous motors of an output <= 18 W") and there's 85011091 ("Universal AC-DC motors of an output <= 37,5 W"). Oh, you bought two different models from one group and the seller mis-declared them? Too bad. You bought ten units of one group and got them delivered in two parcels? Too bad. The fucking customs monkey had a bad day today? Too fucking bad. It's also not just a German thing in terms of high labour cost - sending in items from other European countries will cease next Wednesday, 12th of August due to PPWR, the European Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation. In that piece of shit legislation, every seller inside the EU is required to file their estimated amount of paper and plastic packaging materials over the next year, which is a different process in EVERY. SINGLE. COUNTRY, and aside from the relatively low cost for the actual recycling, there'll be fixed fees for filing the documents in the order of 100-300€ PER COUNTRY PER YEAR. No small shop will fucking do that, so inner-European small-business transactions are also dead. We are a bunch of parasite-ridden losers that will fall further behind from here on (we already are, don't get me wrong). My last parcel from China was a re-order of the excellent EPDM foam of WHL #118 that arrived in mid-June. I haven’t ordered since, and my shopping list has now grown back to some 20ish Euros that would normally justify starting another order at Aliexpress. AE currently offsets the first 3€ fee, but of course I only need small items that are worth pennies, e.g. a 20kg strain gauge (2€ + 3€ punishment fee), a strain gauge converter PCB (0,50€ + 3€ punishment fee) or a C5 to C14 mains adapter (2€ + 3€ punishment fee). I’m gonna wait on these for now, I bet the Chinese will set up far more local warehouses in Europe than they currently have – but I’m unsure how long that’ll take.

But in order to commemorate that date, I decided to sum up all of my Ali history. I have done this before in #R7, but the method no longer works.
Instead, do the following:

1. Log into Aliexpress and go to your orders
2. Open the network debug console (right click and “Inspect” in Firefox or Chrome, change to network tab)
3. Filter for “appkey”, you wanna fetch URLs like this:
https://acs.aliexpress.com/h5/mtop.aliexpress.trade.buyer.order.list/1.0/?jsv=2.5.1&appKey=12574478&t=1786311853683&sign=94df79b24c49fd37ffd6954af9254c69&v=1.0&post=1&type=originaljson&timeout=15000&dataType=originaljsonp&isSec=1&ecode=1&api=mtop.aliexpress.trade.buyer.order.list&method=POST&needLogin=true
4. Click these entries and copy/save their response to a file
5. Click “View more orders” to scroll down by ten sellers, repeat until all orders are on screen

I tried automating that, and the cURL code (12kB per request!) does have some page info in it (..”20%2C\\\%22pageIndex\\\%22%3A2%2C\\\%22pageSize\\\%22%3A11%7D%2C\\\%22id\\\%22%3A\\\%”…), but it also generates some obfuscated code elsewhere that is required, otherwise some “{“api”:”mtop.aliexpress.trade.buyer.order.list”,”data”:{},”ret”:[“FAIL_SYS_SESSION_EXPIRED::Session过期”],”traceId”:”2136115517863033692846874e0fe8″,”v”:”1.0″}” response will come back from the servers. And that breaks basically tomorrow, so the manual method should be a tad more robust, and for casual shoppers, shouldn’t take all that long to complete.

ChatGPT made some extractor script – save your cURL responses as “answers.txt” in the same folder, and this generates a CSV of all important text fields: aliexpress_allorders.py

Summing all up has a couple pitfalls in terms of order totals and currencies – I think, if done correctly, I have spent 3782.95€ (minus A LOT of coupon codes) on Aliexpress since my first order of RS232 converts on July 29th, 2015. Unique item count is 1010 (many many orders include more than one piece per item group), although I also do have several orders of the exact same item, which counts as separate order. I’d say total sum after rebates is more in the 3300€ ballpark – and that also explains why China shopping is dead for now, given that the average item cost me ~3.30€, and would be subject to a 3.00€ bureaucracy fee. At least until the EU customs arseholes have figured out how to individually tax every item that enters the borders via a gray plastic bag, which I think is expected in 2028.

So long, and thanks for all the crap