UPDATE – Christmas Day 2024

We are now GPSR compliant and EU shipping has been re-activated on our eBay listings.
We’ll leave this post in place just as a record of the ridiculous red tape small businesses have to deal with.

Original post

As of December 13th, 2024, the EU General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) will come into force. This regulation will significantly impact every business outside the EU that sells to EU customers. It applies to every product that may ultimately be supplied to a consumer (i.e., a member of the public). While there are already EU regulations in place to ensure the safety of specific product categories such as electricals, children’s toys, and safety equipment, the GPSR is a broad regulation that effectively makes it impossible for small producers to sell their products within the EU.

The GPSR requires that all products undergo documented safety assessments (even if it’s blatantly obvious that no safety risks are present), provision of those assessments in the native language of every destination country, provision of production batch numbers, labelling of individual items, etc. Producers outside the EU also have to provide the details of an EU resident ‘authorised representative’ who is responsible for any queries related to the GPSR.

As a home-based producer of niche products, we simply do not have the time to produce the documentation required to comply with this regulation. Neither do we have the money to employ the services of an authorised representative. Naturally, a whole industry has developed around offering these so-called services, and the average annual cost per product covered is £600. We currently have 40+ items listed on eBay with international shipping enabled. You don’t need to be a mathematician to work out that £24,000+ additional annual expense is wholly impractical.

The most insidious part of the GPSR is that, due to Brexit, Northern Ireland is also affected. From a trading perspective, NI trade falls under EU regulations, so the same compliance is necessary. However, a company based in NI and shipping to the EU doesn’t have to jump through any of these hoops!

It pains us to say that we will be forced to remove the EU and Northern Ireland as shipping destinations from our eBay listings due to this and also remove Northern Ireland shipping from our website.

This is a typically ill-conceived EU regulation designed to prevent large producers of substandard products from flooding the market. The intention is to be applauded, but the all-encompassing wide-brush approach dictates that a tiny producer shipping a few hundred orders of very niche items per year is hit by the same stick as a multinational shipping millions of products.

We are actively seeking ways to deal with this situation and will post updates both here and on social media if anything changes.

Brexit. The unwanted gift that just keeps giving.