Comment by yreg
4 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You realize that the EU as a whole believes this and actively attempts to enforce it on citizens of other countries, right?