The gateway into Europe.

From 1 July 2026 the EU charges a €3 customs fee per tariff line on parcels worth up to €150 imported from outside the EU — an interim measure ahead of removing the €150 duty-free threshold altogether. The UK is separately winding up its own £135 relief. Shipping ten thousand parcels a month from North America or Asia straight to European doorsteps now means ten thousand fees, ten thousand declarations, ten thousand chances to be stopped at the border.

A pallet is none of those things. The reform deliberately rewards businesses that bulk-import, clear customs once, and fulfil locally. The only question is where you land the pallet.

Northern Ireland is the only place on earth inside the UK customs territory that also applies the EU’s customs code — the Windsor Framework. Land a consignment in Belfast, declared “at risk” with EU duty accounted for, and your stock is in EU free circulation:

• Every onward parcel to Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin ships like a domestic EU parcel — no €3 fee, no per-parcel declaration — because properly imported freight never owes it. Duty was settled once, on the pallet.
• The same shelf serves GB & NI orders as domestic UK parcels — a second market of 65 million without a second warehouse. The bonus, not the point.

This is not a loophole waiting to be closed. It is the exact behaviour the EU reform was designed to encourage, running through the one region whose treaty position lets it face both ways. It holds because it is compliant.

Traditional gateway logistics enriches whoever owns the sheds by the port. Cache’s model is different by construction: the warehousing is spare space in people’s homes — a dry cellar bay, a boxroom, a garage corner — across Belfast’s inner districts (BT1, BT4, BT7, BT15), booked whole, priced by the platform and paid out to the host weekly. Forward stock sits two streets from the customer, and the fulfilment margin lands in household budgets, not a landlord’s portfolio. If the gateway grows, the neighbourhood grows with it.

The gateway works at pallet scale, not parcel scale. For EU-bound goods the at-risk duty rule is settled law — there is no version of this where individual low-value parcels relay through a Belfast boxroom to dodge the EU’s fee, and Cache is built to keep it that way:

• Every renter is a KYB-verified business before it can request any space.
• Every booking on a Northern Ireland space carries a declared fulfilment market (EU, dual, or UK-only) and a customs attestation, both written into the contract:

The goods stored under this agreement entered Northern Ireland with customs duty and import charges properly declared and paid under the applicable regime (UK tariff, or EU tariff for goods at risk of onward movement to the EU under the Windsor Framework). The space will not be used to break consignments into individual low-value parcels for onward EU delivery in order to avoid EU import duties or fees, or to misdeclare, relabel or undervalue goods. The Renter remains the importer of record.

• Breach of the attestation is grounds for immediate termination, and the strikes system applies.

Cache is a marketplace, not a customs agent. You remain the importer of record; regimes like the UK Internal Market Scheme and the at-risk/not-at-risk election are your call to make with your own advisers. Nothing on this page is customs, tax or legal advice.

A North American or Asian brand doing steady EU volume — enough to bulk-ship, not enough to sign a continental 3PL contract. Land the consignment, hold forward stock in Belfast for next-day island-of-Ireland delivery and fast EU post, keep the UK market open from the same shelf. Returns consolidation and cargo-bike distribution work the same way they do on our London corridor. Spaces run from 1 m² bays to full garages, weekly billed, 2 weeks to 6 months.

A US deck maker wholesales to independent skate shops across the EU: about 40 shop orders a month, a typical order 15 decks at €35 wholesale (€525). That’s above the €150 low-value line, so the €3 fee was never their real problem — the problem is that every box is its own customs event, and the shop pays for it at the door. The Belfast alternative: one 600-deck pallet a month, cleared once at risk, picked and packed from a 2 m² Cache space (T2 daily access in BT7 — £33.75/week on the live rate card, ~€160/month).

Roughly €1,000 a month saved at this volume — but the bigger win is the last column of every row: the shop stops being an importer. No brokerage line, no doorstep VAT, no week lost at the border. To your customers you’ve become a European distributor.

Illustrative figures. Duty is product-specific (2.7% is the skateboard rate; many categories are 0%) and freight, broker and packing costs vary — have a customs broker run your own numbers before committing stock.

Your numbers aren’t these numbers. Put your own in below — the table redraws around them.