What changed for UK online sellers in 2026: Amazon fee cuts, TikTok Shop's 300,000 sellers and the end of the £135 import rule

On 5 January 2026 Amazon cut its UK referral fee on home products priced at £20 or less from 15% to 8%, according to Amazon's own announcement of its 2026 European fee changes. The cut had been scheduled for 1 February and was brought forward. On 31 July 2026 Retail Gazette reported that TikTok Shop had passed 300,000 UK small business sellers. On 23 June 2026 the Treasury announced that the £135 customs duty exemption on small imported parcels will end on 1 October 2028, five months earlier than planned.

Those three dates describe a market that has moved a long way this year. The big platforms are cutting fees to compete with Temu and Shein, TikTok has become a mainstream sales channel, and both the UK and the EU are dismantling the customs rules that let overseas sellers ship duty-free to your customers' doors. If you are employed and deciding where to list a first product, this briefing sets out what changed, with the source next to each figure, then works a £20 product through two channels.

Amazon: The fee cuts are real, but they are narrow

Amazon's announcement, published on its About Amazon Europe site, lists the UK referral fee reductions category by category. From 15 December 2025, clothing and accessories priced up to £15 moved from 8% to 5%, and items between £15 and £20 moved from 15% to 10%. From 5 January 2026, home products at or under £20 moved from 15% to 8%, pet clothing and food up to £10 moved from 15% to 5%, and grocery, gourmet, vitamins, minerals and supplements up to £10 moved from 8% to 5%.

Amazon describes the package as one of its largest-ever fee reductions, lowering fees by an average of £0.15 per unit across its European stores, with Fulfilment by Amazon parcel fees cut by a further £0.26 per unit on average in the UK; both averages are Amazon's own figures. The standard referral fee for most categories remains 15%, with a £0.25 minimum per item, according to Amazon's UK pricing page, and the Professional selling plan is still £25 a month excluding VAT.

Two things sit underneath the headline. The cuts are aimed at low-priced items, exactly the band where Temu and Shein compete, and above £20 in home products nothing changed. Amazon's July 2026 FBA rate card also adds a 1.5% fuel and logistics surcharge to fulfilment fees from 17 April 2026, which claws back part of the £0.26. The full cost picture before a first sale is in What Amazon FBA really costs a UK beginner in 2026.

Temu and Shein: Big audiences, thin terms, and a shopper backlash

Temu is reported to have 13.1 million monthly active users in the UK, a figure from Similarweb cited in Wise's August 2026 guide to selling on Temu. Temu's pitch to UK sellers is that it currently charges no commission on sales for many of them; that is the platform's own marketing claim, and the same guide notes that terms vary by seller type, category and application outcome. Shein's marketplace, according to its own published terms as reported by Reuters and by the M2E connector documentation, charges 0% referral fees for a new seller's first 30 days, then 12.24% on the UK site and 10% on EU sites.

The audiences are large and the entry cost is low. The problem is what sits behind the numbers: both marketplaces are built around low prices, so a UK seller with a £20 product is competing against factory-direct listings. A zero commission on a product you have had to price down by a third is not a saving.

There is also a mood shift among buyers. Research for Retail Technology Show 2026, reported by Retail Technology Innovation Hub on 31 March 2026, surveyed more than 1,000 UK shoppers: 54% said the government should change the de minimis threshold to stop cheap overseas products flooding the UK market, rising to 68% of Gen Z. The same survey found that 80% of Gen Z shop on Chinese marketplaces and 41% buy from Shein at least monthly, against 16% of older shoppers. The people buying most from these platforms are also the people most in favour of taxing them.

TikTok Shop: 300,000 sellers and 6,000 live broadcasts a day

Retail Gazette reported on 31 July 2026 that more than 300,000 UK small businesses now sell through TikTok Shop, that the number of new sellers joining rose 200% year on year, and that sales generated through TikTok Shop Live sessions rose 55%. More than 6,000 live shopping broadcasts now take place in the UK each day. The examples in the same report are striking: skincare brand Glow For It generated £100,000 in a single live event, and Malik Butchers took £8,000 in a three-hour broadcast, an amount its owner said would normally take three to four days in the shop.

Those are TikTok's chosen examples, so treat them as the top of the distribution rather than the middle. The fee side is less generous than it was: TikTok Shop's UK commission is reported by trade press including TSL Agency in June 2026 to be around 9% for most categories, up from the 5% launch rate, and Marketing4eCommerce reported in December 2025 that the rate rose from 5% to 9% in five EU markets from 8 January 2026. On top of the commission sit creator affiliate commissions, which sellers typically set between 5% and 20%, and your own postage.

The channel suits a product that demonstrates well on camera and a seller willing to film or go live. It does not suit someone who wants to list once and let a warehouse do the rest. The beginner's route is in TikTok Shop UK for beginners: How to start selling without a huge following.

Etsy: A fee rise in June, and a take rate that adds up

Etsy's UK fees in 2026 are a £0.15 listing fee per item (valid for four months), a 6.5% transaction fee on the order total including postage, a payment processing fee of 4% plus £0.20 for UK sellers, and a UK regulatory operating fee that ChannelX reported in April 2026 would rise from 0.32% to 0.48% of order value from 22 June 2026. Offsite Ads, which are compulsory for shops above a sales threshold, add 12% to 15% to any order they generate. A seller who is not VAT registered also pays 20% VAT on all of those fees.

On a plain £20 order with no ads, those lines come to roughly £2.55, about 13% before VAT on fees: lower than Amazon's standard 15%, higher than Amazon's new 8% home-products rate, and with no fulfilment included. Etsy's advantage is the buyer, who expects handmade, personalised or small-batch goods and is less price-sensitive than a Temu shopper.

The customs changes: What actually happens, and when

The UK's £135 low value import relief lets goods worth £135 or less enter without customs duty, which is how an overseas parcel reaches a UK buyer duty-free. On 23 June 2026 the Treasury announced that the relief will end on 1 October 2028 rather than 1 March 2029, citing imports that had trebled in two years, as reported by vatcalc.com. The GOV.UK policy paper of 13 July 2026 confirms the measure comes into force "by October 2028 at the latest", after which duty applies at the UK Trade Tariff rate.

The EU moved first. The European Commission confirmed on 29 June 2026 that from 1 July 2026 a temporary €3 customs duty applies to each tariff line in a parcel worth up to €150 entering the EU, so five T-shirts attract €3 and three T-shirts plus a watch attract €6. That applies to any UK seller posting to EU customers.

For a UK seller who imports stock in bulk, pays duty and VAT at the border and sells domestically, the 2028 change removes a competitor's advantage rather than adding a cost. The seller who is hit is the one shipping single parcels from overseas direct to the buyer. If that is the model you planned to copy, its runway is now two years.

A £20 product through two channels

Take a home product that retails at £20, weighs under 400 grams, and costs £6 landed in the UK including duty and VAT on the bulk import. The Amazon side uses the 8% home-products referral rate and the £3.00 fulfilment fee for a small parcel up to 400 grams from Amazon's rate card effective 1 July 2026, plus the 1.5% surcharge. The TikTok Shop side uses the reported 9% commission, a 10% creator commission that you set yourself, and £3.50 for postage and packaging, an assumption to replace with your own Royal Mail quote.

The example shows why the 2026 fee cuts matter for a beginner: at £20 or below in home products, Amazon has moved from the most expensive marketplace to one of the cheapest, and it does the packing. It also shows what TikTok Shop is really selling you. The creator commission is a marketing budget you pay only when a sale happens, and a sale from your own video keeps that £2.00. Neither column includes advertising, and the honest margin for a first product is the one after the cost of being seen, which you can only learn by selling a small batch.

What a first-time seller should do in Q4 2026, and what waits until January

The fourth quarter is the wrong moment to launch a product you have never sold and the right moment to test one. Ad auctions get more expensive as large retailers spend into peak, Amazon's rate card carries festive season peak fulfilment fees, and listing mistakes cost more when volumes are high. A beginner should use Q4 to prove that a product sells at all, with a batch small enough that the worst case is a few hundred pounds of stock in a cupboard.

The sequencing keeps the bet reversible. A small Q4 batch on one channel is a decision you can undo for a few hundred pounds; a container order in October into three untested channels is not. The logic of sizing a first experiment so the downside is survivable is in How to make a reversible bet: de-risking your first income experiment.

What 2026 tells you about 2027

Three forces pulled the same way this year. Platforms cut fees on cheap goods to fight Temu and Shein, which lowered the cost of entry for a UK seller with a low-priced product. TikTok Shop turned video into a sales channel with 300,000 UK small businesses on it, which gave a seller with no advertising budget a way to be seen. And the UK and EU began closing the duty-free parcel route, which makes a factory-direct overseas listing a little less cheap in the EU already and in the UK from 2028.

None of that guarantees a product will sell. It does mean the arithmetic for a first product, tested in a small batch on one channel, is better in late 2026 than it was a year ago. When I chose a channel for my own first product in 2024, the evening research took six months and the fee tables were the least of it. The tables are now in one place; the months of learning what buyers want have not got shorter.

This article is general information, not legal, financial or tax advice. Platform fees, customs rules and tax thresholds change, and the figures above are the published rates and reports available in September 2026 from the sources named. Check each platform's current fee schedule and GOV.UK before you commit money, and take independent advice on your own position.

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