01 · Verdict
The short answer
Dropshipping as a business model, selling products you do not manufacture and do not warehouse yourself, is fine. People are doing it profitably right now, at scale, across Europe.
What is finished is the specific 2018-era version: list a cheap product, run ads, forward every order to a Chinese supplier who ships it individually, wait three weeks, keep the difference. That version depended on three things that are all gone or going.
The model did not die. The arbitrage did. If your edge was cheap customs and buyers who tolerated a three week wait, your edge has expired.
02 · The autopsy
What actually died
The customs exemption
Goods under €150 used to enter the EU duty free. That relief began phasing out on 1 July 2026. A flat €3 duty now applies per item type, with several countries adding a per-parcel handling fee on top. Because a per-parcel model makes every single order its own customs entry, the charge scales directly with your order count. Scale up, pay more, per order, forever. The full breakdown is here.
Buyer patience
A three week delivery was tolerable when the alternative was also slow. It is not tolerable when the same buyer gets a parcel from a domestic seller the next day. You are not competing against your own past standards, you are competing against whatever arrived at their door yesterday.
Selling into the EU without an EU presence
GPSR applies to almost all non-food consumer products sold in the EU, and a seller shipping from outside it is expected to have an EU Authorised Representative responsible for compliance documentation. The 2026 customs overhaul also made marketplaces directly liable for what they list, which is why compliance demands from platforms got noticeably sharper this year. Selling in from a distance with no EU footprint is harder than it was.
03 · Still standing
What is very much alive
Almost everything people actually like about the model:
- Not manufacturing anything. You still do not need a factory, a brand, or a patent. You find products that sell and you sell them.
- Starting small. Testing a product for a few hundred euros is still the cheapest market research available anywhere.
- No card processor needed, in COD markets. Across Eastern and Southern Europe buyers still expect to pay the courier in cash, which means no merchant account, no chargebacks and a form instead of a checkout.
- Fat margins on the right product. A 3x to 4x markup is still normal in this space and still defensible when the buyer gets the thing tomorrow.
The model that works now looks like this: find the product cheaply, then hold stock near the buyer and deliver in a day or two. That is not a different business. It is the same business with the slow, expensive leg removed.
04 · Evidence
The evidence, not the vibes
Three things worth knowing before you decide the sky is falling.
European ecommerce is growing, not shrinking. B2C turnover across Europe reached roughly €842 billion in 2024, up about 7% nominally. Eastern Europe grew about 18% that year, roughly three times the Western European rate. The demand side is fine.
Cash on delivery is not going away. COD penetration in Central and Eastern Europe remains among the highest anywhere, with Greece, Bulgaria and Slovakia at the top of the range. Card adoption is climbing, but the habit is deeply established and it is what makes the low-friction form-based selling model work at all.
The pain is concentrated in one place. Nothing above hurts a seller holding stock inside the EU. Every one of the three deaths in section two is specifically a tax on shipping individual parcels across the EU border. If your stock is already inside, they mostly do not apply to you.
Where these figures come from
Market size and growth figures are from published European ecommerce industry reporting for 2024 and 2025, and COD penetration figures from ecommerce data providers. Penetration measures how widely a payment method is used, which is not the same as the share of orders it represents. Our own per-country experience is on the data page, with sources.
05 · The move
What to do instead
Keep using per-parcel shipping to test
It is still the cheapest way to find out whether a product sells. Absorb the customs charge on fifty test orders and call it research. Do not build a business on it.
Move anything that proves itself into an EU warehouse
One bulk import, one set of customs line items, then domestic delivery on every order after that. This is the whole play, and it gets stronger every time the per-parcel route gets taxed again.
Sell where cash on delivery is normal
Romania, Bulgaria, Greece. Buyers there expect to pay at the door, which removes the checkout entirely and lets a simple form do the work a full store used to do.
Compete on delivery speed, because you now can
Once stock is in the region, 24 to 48 hour delivery stops being a cost and becomes the reason people accept the parcel. Your acceptance rate is your revenue.
Fix the compliance side once
If you are holding stock in the EU anyway, deal with GPSR and your authorised representative properly rather than waiting for a platform to force it.
If you want to see what the second step costs, the model comparison runs both on the same product, and the fees page publishes every rate.
FAQ
Questions people ask
No. What died is the specific version that shipped one parcel at a time from China and relied on the €150 customs exemption and patient buyers. The underlying model, selling products you neither make nor warehouse yourself, works fine. The winning version now holds stock inside the EU and delivers in 24 to 48 hours.
Yes, on the right structure. European B2C ecommerce turnover was around €842 billion in 2024 and Eastern Europe grew roughly 18% that year, so demand is not the problem. The margin has moved from people who buy the cheapest traffic to people who deliver reliably and quickly.
Three things at once: the EU began phasing out the €150 customs duty exemption on 1 July 2026, buyer tolerance for multi-week delivery collapsed as domestic next-day delivery became normal, and GPSR compliance made selling into the EU without an EU presence harder.
Not if it is working for you. The sensible move is to keep using per-parcel shipping to test products cheaply, then move anything that proves itself into a European warehouse so delivery drops to a day or two and customs stops scaling with your order count.
No. Cash on delivery penetration in Central and Eastern Europe remains among the highest anywhere, with Greece, Bulgaria and Slovakia at the top. Card payment is growing, but the COD habit is well established and it is what makes low-friction form-based selling work in the region.