Every few weeks somebody asks the same question in a slightly different way: is there a threshold below which a small shop does not have to deal with packaging rules at all? The honest answer is no, and the confusion is understandable, because thresholds genuinely exist and they do something else. They simplify what you have to report, not whether you owe anything. A shop shipping two hundred parcels a month is in scope in the same way as one shipping two hundred thousand, and the practical consequence is a cost per parcel plus a fixed annual floor that hits smallest sellers hardest per order.
- Thresholds usually govern reporting detail, not whether the obligation applies.
- The variable cost is small per parcel and the fixed cost is not, which inverts the usual economics of scale.
- A marketplace may handle some obligations for its own sales; your own shop is still yours.
- This is a cost question here. Who must register where is a legal question for your scheme and your advisers.
Why the threshold story keeps circulating
Because there is something real underneath it. Several schemes offer simplified declarations below a certain tonnage, which reduces the reporting burden considerably: fewer categories, less frequent submission, sometimes a flat estimate rather than a detailed breakdown. That is a genuine convenience and it gets retold as an exemption because the difference is subtle until somebody asks for money.
The other source is marketplaces. Where a platform takes on obligations for sales made through it, sellers reasonably conclude they are covered, and then discover the scope stops at the platform's own boundary. Sales through your own shop are yours.
What it actually costs a small shop
The variable half is charged per kilogram of material placed on a market, which on an ordinary parcel is a few cents. At two hundred parcels a month that is a two-figure annual number, and nobody would organise a business around it.
The fixed half is where small sellers feel it. Scheme membership, minimum fees and any representative you are required to appoint are annual amounts that do not shrink with volume, so they sit in your fixed costs like an insurance premium, and per parcel they are large precisely because the parcel count is small.
| 200 parcels a month | 20.000 parcels a month | |
|---|---|---|
| Variable fee, a few cents each | small | material |
| Fixed annual costs | the same amount | the same amount |
| Fixed cost per parcel | large | negligible |
| Where it shows up | overhead | logistics and overhead |
The decision it actually forces
Not whether to comply, but which markets are worth being in. A fixed annual cost per market, set against a handful of parcels a month into that market, is the thing most likely to make a marginal country unprofitable, and it is invisible until somebody puts the fee beside the order count.
That is a genuinely useful piece of analysis and it is arithmetic rather than law: total annual fixed cost for the market, divided by parcels shipped there, added to the per-parcel variable fee. If the result is a meaningful share of the margin on those orders, the market is a decision rather than a habit.
Where each half belongs on a statement
The variable fee is a per-parcel logistics cost and belongs beside the label, the picking and the box, because it scales with what you ship. The fixed annual amounts have no per-order driver at all and belong in overhead, spread across the days they cover like an insurance premium.
That split is not bookkeeping fussiness. Putting the fixed half into a per-parcel figure makes a quiet month look structurally more expensive per order than a busy one, which is the opposite of what is happening, and it hides the fixed floor that is the actual decision for a small shop.
What this post is not
It is not advice about who must register, where, or by when. Those are legal questions with liability attached, the answers vary by market and by how you sell, and the right people to ask are your scheme and your advisers. We build the cost side and are careful not to wander across that line.
What we can do is make the number concrete. A packaging EPR calculator takes your own parcel composition and your own scheme rate and turns them into a figure per parcel, per month and per year, which is the input every one of the decisions above needs.
The five minutes worth spending
- Weigh a typical parcel by material: board, plastic, paper, anything else that leaves with the order.
- Take your own rate from your scheme contract rather than from any published table, including ours.
- Compute the per-parcel fee and multiply by a year of parcels; that is the variable half.
- Add every fixed annual amount per market, then divide by that market's parcel count.
- Compare the total against the margin on those orders, and treat any marginal market as a decision.
The full mechanics, with the arithmetic worked through per material and per market, are in packaging EPR cost per parcel, which is the piece to read before making any of those decisions.