Why La Poste suspended your parcels to the United States
The decision is postal, the cause is American, and the way out is written on the same page as the suspension.
Updated 11 October 2026 · 7 min read
What La Poste actually wrote
On 17 September 2026, sending certain products to the United States stopped being possible through the consumer Colissimo offers - at the post office counter and on laposte.fr. The notice is short and it names the cause: the American procedure.
« we have to temporarily suspend the shipping of these specific products through the consumer Colissimo offers, from 17 September 2026. »It is not a French decision taken alone. La Poste writes that every European postal operator has to adapt its declaration forms to the new American customs process, which is what makes this a European story rather than a French one.
« all European postal operators are required to adapt their declaration forms to the new US customs process »Which products are caught
The categories La Poste names are the ones CPSC regulates most heavily: children's items, toys, fashion jewelry, electronics, sporting goods, and household products including candles.
« certain products such as children's articles, toys, fashion jewellery, electronic products, clothing and sporting goods are subject to a reinforced declaration, requiring a specific customs form and compulsory pre-registration of the sender of those products on the CPSC site »Two things are worth holding on to. The list is not closed, and La Poste says so itself - so a product that is fine today can be named tomorrow. And the list is a postal reading of an American rule: what decides in the end is whether a CPSC rule names your product, not which box a carrier put it in.
« This list is not exhaustive and may change at any time. »How we got here, in three dates
The suspension did not come out of nowhere. It is the third step of a sequence that started in Washington and reached a post office counter in France ten weeks later.
First, 8 July 2026: certificate data stops being something you keep and becomes something you file, before the goods arrive. Then the carriers, who are the ones who file, have to build a way to collect that data from every sender - which is what La Poste describes when it says the forms have to be adapted. Then, on 17 September, the consumer offers close for the products concerned, because a form that cannot carry the data cannot carry the parcel.
« Since 8 July 2026, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has required the prior electronic filing of certificates of compliance for imported consumer products subject to a safety standard »The fourth date is already published: 22 October 2026, when CPSC requires eFiled certificates for mail shipments. Whatever the postal procedure looks like after that, it will not look like September.
« CPSC will require eFiled certificates for mail shipments, via a Full or Reference Message Set, beginning on October 22, 2026. »What stayed open
The suspension covers the consumer offers. La Poste points professional senders to two of its own products, on one condition: having done the CPSC formalities first.
« Shipments via Colissimo Facilité and Chronopost Pro are possible for professional senders who have already completed the formalities with CPSC. »That sentence is the whole map. "Having completed the formalities" means being able to produce certificate data for each parcel - either the three Registry identifiers, or the full set of elements on the annex.
« the product identifier (Product ID), the certifier identifier (Certifier ID), the version identification (Version ID). »What it costs to ignore it
Two numbers circulate, and both come from the carriers rather than from us. La Poste mentions a penalty of up to five thousand dollars per non-compliant parcel. Colissimo describes storage charged by the American authorities when a parcel waits.
« subject to a penalty of up to $5,000 per parcel. »« Storage fees may then be applied by the US authorities, at 0.08 USD per kilogram and per working day of storage beyond five days of storage »Whether either lands on a given parcel, nobody can promise. What is certain is the thing that has no cost and changes everything: a parcel that carries its data is not the parcel that gets picked out.
What to do this week
Start by finding out whether your product is concerned at all, which takes a few questions and costs nothing. A third of the shops we see are not: their product is not named by any rule requiring a certificate, and their parcel needs a declaration rather than a certificate.
If it is concerned, the order that saves the most time is: gather what the certificate needs from your manufacturer, open the CPSC account, issue the certificate, then register the product so each parcel carries three identifiers instead of a full page.