Children’s toys with small parts, smoke detectors that ignore smoke and make-up with banned ingredients: those who bought products from countries outside Europe in recent years were not protected by European regulations on product safety. As of December 13, 2024, this is different, reports the Ministry of Economic Affairs Friday. Then a new European regulation will come into effect, which should promote fair competition in addition to product safety.
Under the new rules, dropshippers are no longer allowed to resell products from China at a profit to Dutch consumers. From now on, every purchased product must have either a manufacturer in Europe or a European branch that can be approached by consumers and regulators. “A mailbox or registration with the Chamber of Commerce is really not enough,” a spokesperson for Minister Micky Adriaansens (Economic Affairs and Climate, VVD) told Friday. NRC.
The Dutch buy stuff on the internet en masse. At the beginning of this year, for the first time in the Netherlands, there were more online stores than brick and mortar stores, it reported Central Bureau of Statistics. According to the Consumers’ Association, 30 percent of online purchases come from countries outside the European Union: from China, the United States and the United Kingdom.
The online shopping frenzy has been causing problems for years, to which the old product safety guideline from 2001 had no answer. Although a power bank from China is very cheap, it does not have to comply with European safety rules. In 2019, the Consumers’ Association bought — as an experiment — 250 products from popular foreign webshops such as AliExpress and Amazon. Two thirds of these did not meet the safety requirements.
Another problem arises when that power bank starts to smoke after the third use and causes a fire. The consumer can now not hold any party responsible for the consequences. Angry, BNNVara’s YouTube program, repeatedly exposed dropshippers who were nowhere to be found when their products ordered in China were not delivered, or turned out to be less robust than promised. Finally, Dutch companies experienced unfair competition from foreign companies that did not have to comply with European safety rules.
Enforcement will be in the hands of the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA). If they identify a product as unsafe, platforms must remove it — as well as all identical products. The NVWA responds to reports on the one hand, and proactively looks for shops that violate the rules on the other, says the Adriaansens spokesperson. “We really have no illusions that this will keep all unsafe products out of Europe, but this is better than doing nothing anyway.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 27, 2023.