Orders for shipment to EU addresses are temporarily unavailable. Orders to all other countries are unaffected.
This is because the EU now requires any company selling any products directly to EU consumers to appoint an 'authorised representative' or 'responsible person' located within the EU to act as a point of contact for any queries from the authorities about conformity of those products with EU regulations.
Starting from 13 Dec 2024, the GPSR (General Product Safety Regulation) expanded this requirement to cover all products, instead of just CE marked products, and also requires individual risk assessments for products not covered by CE marking directives. These requirements apply to all products, even those which are extremely unlikely to pose any sort of safety risk.
There are articles in various places online about the impact of GPSR. For example, a very detailed article here: https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/articles/GPSR.html
Although we fully support the aim of making sure products are safe, the details of how the EU has decided to try doing this are a massive barrier to trade for small businesses outside the EU, due to the large amount of extra administrative work, plus the extra cost of hiring a representative located in the EU.
To make matters worse, at the time of writing the EU does not yet seem to have published guidelines for small and medium enterprises ('SMEs') on how to comply with the GPSR, despite article 17 of the GPSR requiring the EU to do so. Specifically, the GPSR says "The Commission shall adopt specific guidelines for economic operators, with particular regard to the needs of those that qualify as SMEs, including micro-enterprises, on how to fulfil the obligations laid down in this Regulation". We have been unable to locate any such guidelines for SMEs, so either they have not yet been published, or the EU has not made them easy enough to find.
We did find the following EU parliamentary questions and answers:
- https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2024-001835_EN.html , answered 6 Nov 2024 at https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2024-001835-ASW_EN.html . The answer says that support designed to facilitate compliance of SMEs with the GPSR 'will be made available', suggesting that guidelines had not yet been published at that time.
- https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-10-2024-002385_EN.html - asked 1 Nov 2024, it includes a question about when SME guidelines will be published. Answered more than 2 months later at https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-10-2024-002385-ASW_EN.html . The answer has links to general guidance about the GPSR, but indicates that specific guidelines for SMEs had not yet been published, even though the GPSR had been in effect for more than 3 weeks at the time that answer was written.
The lack of information is very unhelpful - it is difficult to comply with the GPSR when full details about the best way for us to do that have not yet been made available.
We are hoping to sort out the necessary paperwork and resume selling directly to EU customers at some point, but do not yet have an estimate for when that will be, sorry.