Comment by nottorp
11 hours ago
Do they actually have a business presence in the EU?
If not, how would those rules apply to them?
Edit: tbh, the new "user friendly" idea of automatically converting US prices to the local currency of the visitor in spite of the company not having any connection to the visitor's locale always makes me think of drop shippers, not of legitimate businesses.
Especially if i'm in a non USD non EUR country, I am fully aware that there are different currencies in the world, I already have an established process for converting between those currencies and it's likely to be more to my advantage than whatever Stripe offers so please cut it down.
They are mandated to provide 2-year legal guarantee under EU consumer protection law when they target EU consumers -> i.e. operate an eshop that ships to EU and sells in local currencies. Regardless of where they are located.
> They are mandated
That's nice and ideal, but unenforceable in reality unless the company has a presence in the EU.
Genuinely asking, if someone really wanted to play that game with the EU, could the EU escalate to preventing the import of the products?
> unenforceable
Law makers aren't stupid: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2025/7728... (the Hauge Convention 2019 has been ratified by the UK has been in effect ~10mo ago).
The UK wants to rejoin the Lugano Convention, too; though, it remains to be seen if EFTA/EU will let them in.
> Regardless of where they are located.
Absolutely not true at all.
Why not? Isn't that what the EU law says?
> Regardless of where they are located.
This is clearly nonsense. There is nothing the EU can do to enforce this.
> There is nothing the EU can do to enforce this.
Well they can turn back shipments at customs. And they can collect fines if any leadership of the company comes to the EU. If you stay outside the EU for the rest of your life, you're probably fine.
And those EU consumer protection laws apply outside the EU?
I know that USers think their laws apply everywhere, but that's just a myth.
In the opinion of the EU, they do as long as the customer is in the EU.
Everything else is just enforcement.
They apply to products that a company ships to the EU, yes. As another poster points out, these could (in principle at least) be seized at customs if they are noncompliant.
Ask Kim Dot Com about that myth
Same goes for e.g. GDPR compliance. You need to comply with GDPR when offering services to individuals in the EU no matter where you are based.
Clearly! I see how this is a bit unusual for GDPR etc in a services digital world, but for physical products it's extremely standard everywhere that local laws apply to foreign companies.
If you sell medical devices (apparently even down to toothbrushes) in the USA, you have to follow FDA rules. If you sell children's toys in the EU, you've had to follow EU consumer regulations (e.g. CE mark) at least since the 90s. Going back to the 70s, if you sold a physical product in the US as a foreign company you had to follow local rules about maximum delivery times and minimum warranties. If you don't follow the rules, your shipments get blocked at customs, and any marketplaces (Amazon) selling your products get fines as well for not verifying you appropriately, so marketplaces will verify and ban your business too if you blatantly violate local rules (e.g. selling devices containing radios without FCC approval). If you're selling laptops at any scale, you need to follow the local rules for every country you ship to.
There'll certainly be cases everywhere where enforcement isn't perfect (if you contact a tiny vendor in China and they ship to you directly and you sign for & pay the customs yourself, in practice you'll get away with it, or you can always travel to a country to buy a product and carry it back personally) but in the general case local regs on physical product sales are not unusual or optional at all.
You realize that the EU as a whole believes this and actively attempts to enforce it on citizens of other countries, right?
They sell to the EU, so they have to follow their regulations. If they don't, the devices can be seized by customs.
Tbh there are more issues if they wanted to be compliant with EU regulations. I'm fine that they aren't compliant (they aren't in the EU, after all), but it's something to be aware of when ordering from them.
> They sell to the EU, so they have to follow their regulations. If they don't, the devices can be seized by customs.
Seized by customs because they don't offer 2y warranty or include USB charger?
No. That's ridiculous. You can import whatever you want.
Wouldn't customs seizing the device be a bigger problem for the importer?
From consumer perspective it's the problem of the seller. I would ask for a refund and if they refused I would do a chargeback.
They don't have to do business in EU if they don't want to follow the rules.
They are a UK company.