Well, we have arrived at the stage where we can play the game of “who is responsible for this mess?“.
Is it the UK with Brexit? Is it EU for becoming more stringent with every law and regulation?
Who knows…
It’s certainly easy to just blame one and not the other.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
What I was referring to is the new GPSR regulation of the EU.
In short, if you want to sell something within the EU and you are not in the EU, then you have to have a responsible person or organization, which takes care of customer issues.
Now, if you are a small sole trader, who just wants to sell some tat on the internet and you are outside of the EU, then you are out of luck my friend. Unless you are making enough money to pay for a representative. So that’s 99% percent of Etsy, eBay and Shopify sellers.
Thanks EU…
And of course this applies to the UK as well, due to Brexit. And me living in the UK, I am pretty much screwed in terms of EU sales.
Truth be told, they weren’t a huge market for me at this point anyway, but by the looks of it, it’s not going to be in the future either.
So who do I blame?
I blame both to be honest.
On one hand, I understand what the EU is trying to do to battle the ever increasing garbage that is flooding the West from China through Temu, AliExpress and now even Amazon and eBay. But let’s be brutally honest. Nobody thinks this will have any kind of impact on those platforms and sellers. I bet that a lot of Chinese tat will have the one same guy as a representative. Hundreds of them…
But all the small and honest businesses are caught in the fray and sure as shit we will see companies taking advantage to sell representative services for exorbitant prices.
Where does Brexit have a say in this?
Well, it was a shit show to say the least. The way it was handled and deals which were done are utter shit.
How hard it would’ve been to stay at least in the economic circle of the EU?
But even so, how hard it would’ve been to struck a deal on this stupid GPSR regulation to make the UK exempt?
Apparently it is really hard. Especially when the situation is handled based on personal grievances and such.
They always say that it is to protect the majority, but in the end neither the majority, nor the minority will see any benefit from it.
The ones which this should keep at bay, will find the way regardless as corruption is like water.
It will seep in to every crack and then weaken the structure.
As I used to say, laws only apply to the law-abiding citizen. Criminals don’t care about the law and will avoid it whenever they can.
What now?
Well, we wait and see if there are going to be any changes in terms of:
UK relations
Platforms providing representative services
Loosening regulations for micro and small businesses
Until one of those happens all I can say to the EU…
So long and thanks for all the fish.