PPRO recently published the latest Europe→Europe edition of its Almanac Corridor Series. It provides a corridor-by-corridor guide for merchants and PSPs expanding across the region, and I would highly recommend it to anyone working on cross-border commerce in Europe. As expected, it is a polished and well-written document.
For me, the most interesting thing in it is something the report itself treats only in passing, and it sits in plain sight on the corridor pages.
The almanac spotlights four European commerce corridors:
| Germany | the Netherlands | |
| Spain | Portugal | |
| Germany | Poland | |
| Germany | Sweden |
Each spotlight charts the destination’s top origin markets for cross-border purchases, and it was when I read the four charts together that I did a double-take.
The Netherlands’ top origin market is not Germany but China, at 42%. Portugal’s is China at 40%, Poland’s is China at 47%, and Sweden’s is also China at 43%. Germany, the titular country across three of these corridors, peaks at 19%, whilst Spain only manages 30% in Portugal, still ten points behind China.
Then you turn back to the report’s cover page, which reads “Europe→Europe.”
Counted in purchases, Europe’s biggest cross-border e-commerce corridor does not run between European countries at all. It runs from China.
The part that interests me as an architect of global commerce is what this corridor runs on, because it relies, to a striking degree, on Europe’s own local payment methods. I will come to that, but first, let’s do some further analysis and really test that assertion since it seems counterintuitive.
The China-first finding is not just one report’s quirk
The almanac’s corridor charts cite the International Post Corporation’s (IPC) cross-border shopper survey, so let’s start there. The IPC’s 2025 edition, fielded among 30,970 shoppers across 37 countries in September 2025, found Temu alone accounting for 24% of shoppers’ most recent cross-border purchases, on par with Amazon. The same survey round places China first as origin market in 26 of 30 European countries, and the four exceptions are telling ones, since Luxembourg and Austria shop German whilst Ireland and Iceland shop British.
If survey data is not your preferred source of insight, let’s ask the people who move the parcels instead. A postal operator does not need to phrase a survey question at all, since it’s focused on counting boxes. Geopost’s 2025 e-shopper barometer has China as the top country of purchase for Europe’s regular cross-border shoppers, at 48%, ahead of the United States and Germany. Sweden’s transport-industry parcel index reported in 2024 that China had overtaken Germany as the top origin of parcels arriving from abroad. A year later it still called China the dominant origin country. La Poste’s chief executive told the French Senate in late 2024 that Temu and Shein together accounted for 22% of the parcels his company handled, a point ahead of Amazon. Let the magnitude of that comparison sink in for a second.
If we move from parcels to customs data, we land in the same place. The European Commission counted 4.6 billion sub-€150 consignments entering the EU in 2024. Its latest figures put 2025 close to 5.9 billion, with growth of 26%. The Council records 91% of the 2024 shipments as coming from China. Even the ECB has weighed in, finding through its consumer survey that more than half of euro-area consumers have used Chinese e-commerce platforms, with one in five doing so at least monthly.
Surveys, parcel counts, customs declarations, and consumer research each measure this corridor differently, yet the direction never changes. Whichever of these sources you do the maths from, it comes out the same way.
China leads Europe’s cross-border purchases, not its cross-border euros
Let’s also be clear about something which is easy to misinterpret. There are two measures at play in the IPC data, and they are easy to conflate. The survey figures are purchase incidence. The IPC asks each shopper where their most recent cross-border purchase came from, so every respondent contributes one answer, regardless of how often they buy, and the result captures how widely and how often people buy from a place. A purchase count is stricter, and represents an actual tally of orders, and the Dutch Thuiswinkel Markt Monitor holds the best publicly accessible data I can find. Its 2025 edition has Chinese eCommerce platforms taking 31% of the 44.8 million cross-border purchases Dutch shoppers made last year, up from 28% in 2024, whilst the American and British shares fell. In Germany, the bevh trade association reports that roughly one in fifteen online orders are now going to large Asian platforms.
Now, when we look at overall cross-border transaction value counted in euros, the picture inverts. The same Dutch monitor gave Chinese platforms only €434 million of €4.4 billion in cross-border spending in 2024, roughly a tenth by value, and 2024 remains the latest year with a published value split, since the 2025 release reports total cross-border spending of €4.5 billion without breaking out the Chinese share.
The EU’s customs ledger makes the same point at a continental scale, where low-value e-commerce consignments account for around 97% of parcels imported into the EU by volume and only around 2% of import value. And measured by how many buyers they reach, sellers in other EU countries still beat sellers outside the EU, 33% of European online buyers against 20%. A claim that China dominates European cross-border e-commerce by value would simply be factually wrong, and I am not making that claim.
The enormous disparity between the volume and value rankings is explained by basket size. The ECB finds that almost two-thirds of euro-area orders on Chinese platforms are for €25 or less, and the same Commission fact page puts the average declared value of a low-value consignment at below €9. Transaction-panel data from Measurable AI put Temu’s average UK order at about $34 in 2024, with analyst figures for Europe clustering around 30 to 35 dollars. Fevad, for contrast, puts France’s average online basket at €62. The key takeaway here is that basket orders on the China corridor are half-sized or oftentimes smaller, but they arrive in far greater numbers.
Looking back at this through the payments lens, the transaction volume makes an important point. Every one of those cross-corridor purchases lands on checkout infrastructure as a payment to route, authenticate and complete, whether that is a card authorisation carrying a 3DS SCA decision or an iDEAL or BLIK push confirmed in the shopper’s own banking app. Each one incurs a payment method fee, a fraud screen, and, on account-to-account rails, a refund path that the merchant has to operate. You have to remember that checkout infrastructure does not process baskets by the euro. It processes transactions one at a time, and a €12 basket exercises the machinery as fully as a €120 one does. Volume is volume.
Counted in euros the China corridor is a modest slice of European e-commerce, but counted in purchases no European origin market comes close.
The corridor runs through Europe’s own checkouts
Returning to my preferred subject matter of digital (alternative) payments, the payments and arguably trust instruments Europe built for itself are the ones driving this volume. Shein’s own How-to-Pay pages list iDEAL for Dutch shoppers, BLIK for Polish ones, and MB WAY and Multibanco for those from Portugal. AliExpress has accepted BLIK since at least 2020, by the scheme’s own announcement. Temu arrived in the Netherlands offering iDEAL at launch. Last year it announced BLIK, Bancontact, MB WAY and Multibanco through Nuvei, although Polish reporting suggests parts of that rollout are still catching up with the press release.
The plumbing, in turn, is done by the same PSPs that serve European merchants. Adyen, which has processed for Temu since its 2022 launch, describes the platform as “often one of the first” to implement new and popular payment methods. And in a detail I mean warmly rather than pointedly, PPRO itself partnered with Temu last September to bring European shoppers their preferred local payment methods. I feel it’s safe to say that the authors of the almanac know this corridor first-hand, which is presumably part of why their data on it is so good.
Having the right payment method mix for your market is a no-brainer if you want to drive conversion, but price is perhaps an even bigger factor that built this corridor. PostNord’s Nordic research finds that more than half of cross-border shoppers cite lower prices as the main reason they shop abroad, and no payment method by itself can compensate for a basket that costs three times as much.
But when you combine payment mix and price, I would argue that localised checkout is what converts the price advantage at scale, because a shopper who baulks at an unfamiliar way to pay never gets far enough to enjoy it.
Asian eCommerce platforms have treated the acceptance of iDEAL, BLIK, and MB WAY as table stakes since their arrival in their respective European markets. And it is worth being precise about what the best available merchant data actually shows, because the lazy contrast here would be wrong. Stripe’s 2022 checkout study of each country’s top hundred sites found that local acceptance is the domestic norm, with 85% of top Dutch sites offering iDEAL against an 88% consumer preference, and 82% of top Polish sites offering BLIK against 66%. The Chinese platforms did not clear a bar the local leaders had missed. They matched the domestic standard from outside, almost immediately, market after market.
The genuine gaps in that study sit elsewhere. The newer local instruments were under-served even at home, with only 22% of top Spanish sites offering Bizum against a 38% preference and 49% of Swedish sites offering Swish against 65%. And the question the study could not settle is the cross-border one, because as far as I can find, nobody has published an equivalent audit of European merchants selling into their neighbours’ markets. The almanac’s whole premise is that merchants expanding across European borders under-serve local payment preferences, and my read is that this is exactly where the asymmetry lives. One side of this market treats every European market as home turf at the checkout. The other side mostly localises only its own. The localisation asymmetry, not the parcel price, is the part of this story that should resonate most with payments people.
The €3 duty makes Chinese-origin parcels more expensive, not the checkout
Since 1 July 2026, low-value consignments entering the EU have carried a flat customs duty of €3 per item category in the parcel. The measure is a temporary bridge scheduled to run until July 2028, when the wider customs reform, agreed in trilogue in March but still awaiting formal adoption, is due to bring genuine tariff rates and the new EU Customs Data Hub. A separate handling fee on low-value imports, floated by the Commission at €2 for parcels sent straight to consumers, was agreed in the same trilogue with its amount left for the Commission to set.
The United States also responded to similar experiences of an overabundance of low-value parcels entering its borders. The US suspended its exemption for all countries from 29 August 2025. The UPU reported postal traffic to the US down 81% on the day the change landed, compared with a week earlier. CBP reported more than $1 billion in duties on some 246 million low-value shipments across 2025. In Europe, the repositioning started before the duty had even landed, and Mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce tracked Temu halving its Google Shopping visibility between March and June of this year, with Shein withdrawing from those auctions almost entirely.
So with parcels now repriced, orders and transaction volumes will likely respond. But none of these changes touches the checkout per se. A customs duty changes what a shopper pays and where goods clear customs, but it does not change which payment methods a checkout accepts, how well its authorisation flows are tuned, or which payment button a Dutch or Polish thumb reaches for out of habit (a button that in the Netherlands is itself mid-migration, as iDEAL becomes Wero). If the platforms respond by moving inventory and fulfilment closer to the shopper, the parcels become domestic whilst the checkout advantage stays exactly where it was.
The permanent regime is pencilled in for 1 July 2028, and the interim duty can be extended if that slips. Between now and then, I wouldn’t necessarily watch whether the China corridor shrinks, because some of it will. Instead I would watch whether European merchants and their PSPs close the localisation gap the corridor has exposed. The almanac’s own conclusion observes that consumer payment preferences “remain resolutely local”, and on that it is exactly right. The uncomfortable corollary is that the businesses that have taken the observation most seriously so far are not European ones.
For a merchant expanding across Europe, the benchmark for payment localisation is no longer the incumbent next door. It is a Chinese platform checkout experience. And until that benchmark is met, I would expect the almanac’s next edition to keep saying Europe→Europe on the cover, and China on every chart.