Why we're no longer shipping to the EU & Northern Ireland
Share
You may have seen lots of small businesses recently announce that they are no longer shipping into the EU and I sadly have to announce that our website will be doing the same.
Now you may be wondering why, let me break it down for you.
What does this mean?
The European Commission has recently announced that from the 13th of December anyone who imports good into the EU will have to comply with the new GPSR rules. GPSR stands for General Product Safety Regulations, the EU want to clamp down on the safety of the products that enter and are distributed throughout the EU.
There are many new rules and legislations that businesses have to comply to including labelling every product (In the language of the country the product is intended for), declaring where is was manufactured, having traceability for every product, and also having a representative within the EU. As you can imagine all of the changes that need to be made are not only time consuming but also very expensive. (Some small businesses have been quoted thousands to have an EU representative, sadly this is just not feasible for many of us.)
Unfortunately if you don't comply with the new rules you will be fined and if your business uses a third party platform to sell (e.g.: Etsy, Shopify, any e-commerce platform) they can take down your platform.
What about the future?
Luckily because this is a new legislation there may be chance in the future that I can reopen shipping within the EU & Northern Ireland. The regulation document that everyone has to comply to is very confusing and lots of businesses are trying to figure out what to do for the best. There may be changes to it in the future or there may be loop holes, we won't know until the legislation takes effect of December 13th.
As the EU is a big portion of where I ship my products, I really didn't want to have to take the precautions that I am but for the future of my business I have to do so.
Thank you to anyone within the EU and Northern Ireland for ordering or supporting my small business in anyway that you can, it really means a lot and hopefully I can reopen postage to your countries soon.