Shein: during the XXL inspection in Roissy, nearly 25% of non-textile items were non-compliant

320,474 packages checked, containing a total of more than 500,000 items. This is the official assessment of the unprecedented control operation for Shein small packages, launched on November 6 by the customs services at Roissy airport, under the watchful eye of the Ministers of Public Accounts and Commerce, and numerous cameras.

A highly publicized operation, and for a reason: since the day before, the Asian e-commerce giant was under threat of outright suspension. In question, as we revealed to you on November 1, the sale of child pornography dolls then, a few days later, category A weapons on its website.

We do not know how long it took the customs agents to complete the titanic task – which some actors in Roissy doubted had been completed to the end. The Customs department communicated to Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France the first, piecemeal, lessons learned from this major control operation.

Toys, cosmetics and electrical appliances spotted

It distinguishes, among the goods contained in packages just removed from planes, between textile products (mainly clothing) and non-textile products. The controls carried out on this last category “revealed a non-compliance rate of around 25%”, indicates the Customs department. She lists « counterfeits, lack of marking on cosmetic products, lack of technical documentation on electrical devices, non-compliance with standards relating to toys.

No details on the precise number of products incriminated, nor the number of reports drawn up following these findings.

No figures are given for the category of textile products, which probably represented the majority of the immobilized packages, and posed less of a problem. “If the textile products checked revealed little non-compliance, this result can be explained by the change in the commercial policy of Shein, which had closed its marketplace a few days before the customs operation and only sold products from its own brand,” the Customs Department further indicates.

In fact, Shein had only announced the suspension of its marketplace the day before the customs inspection. But the company, through its spokesperson in France, assured that it had initiated measures very quickly after the discovery of the child pornography dolls on October 31, by delisting, for example, “adult” products.

The announced results are a far cry from the figures regularly cited on the contents of packages sent by Shein and comparable platforms – but none of these figures related to a control supposed to be so exhaustive.

The recent report from a parliamentary fact-finding mission on the control of products imported into France recalled that 96% of the products targeted for control in 2022, in Roissy, on pallets of small packages, were counterfeit or non-compliant. And the fraud crackdown has, this year, identified 60% of dangerous toys among the items for sale on e-commerce platforms.

Contacted, the Shein company did not wish to react.