04/09/2026
🇪🇺 Why we must pause shipping to the EU 😢
Why are we - and many small businesses - pausing shipments to the EU?
1. Customs. Since July the €150 duty-free threshold is gone. There’s now a €3 charge per product category in the parcel — not per parcel. An order of rope alone is €3, but rope plus hardware plus a book is three separate categories and €9. A further €2 handling fee is expected from November.
2. Packaging (PPWR/EPR). We have to register separately in every EU country we ship to, at roughly €300–1,100 per country per year, plus a paid local representative in each one.
3. Product safety (GPSR). We have to appoint and pay an EU-based representative, and carry the documentation to go with it.
4. The admin, and the risk. Registrations, reports, declarations, per-country paperwork — and serious fines if we get any of it wrong. The fees and the rules are the same whether you’re Amazon or two people in a railway arch in Peckham. A business our size simply cannot keep up.
So we are very sorry to say we’ve had to pause shipping to the EU. To the EU customers we’ve served for the last ten years: thank you. We wish this were different, but it just doesn’t make financial sense for us any more.
We’ll keep doing what we do best — the best rope and the best customer service, in the UK and internationally ❤️ And if things change, we’ll of course resume sales to the EU 🇪🇺
