Enforcement 4/25: Enforcement of e-commerce articles 2024

Internet sales are increasing rapidly and for market surveillance authorities this poses special challenges and requires new ways of exercising enforcement.

In this project, we controlled a total of 84 products – toys, jewelry, electronics and soft plastic products – purchased from 23 different e-commerce actors.

The results show that the products purchased from marketplaces had the most non-compliances (62 percent), followed by drop shipping stores (55 percent) and classic web shops (25 percent). One explanation for the results is that when importing into EU, there is not always an actor within EU that check EU compliance of the products before they reach the buyer.

Common non-compliances were excessive levels of lead in electrical products, cadmium in jewelry, and short-chain chlorinated paraffins and phthalates in soft plastic materials in all kinds of articles.
All online actors removed non-compliant articles after they were informed of the non-compliances.

The results show a low level of compliance, especially for products purchased through web shops and platforms that use drop shipping. Among companies that engage in drop shipping, there seems to be a perception that they only mediate the products and are therefore not responsible for the products, despite the lack of information on who is the responsible seller on the product page (name and address details). As long as there is no information about who is the seller of a product, the Swedish Chemicals Agency consider the actor that offers the product to consumers as responsible.

The results presented in this report are not based on a random sample and therefore do not reflect the entire market. The selection of samples is based on experiences with restricted products from previous enforcement.