Orders for shipment to EU addresses are temporarily unavailable through our website. Orders to all other countries are unaffected.
This is because the EU now requires any company selling any products directly to EU consumers to appoint an 'authorised representative' or 'responsible person' located within the EU to act as a point of contact for any queries from the authorities about conformity of those products with EU regulations.
Starting from 13 Dec 2024, the GPSR (General Product Safety Regulation) expanded this requirement to cover all products, instead of just CE marked products, and also requires individual risk assessments for products not covered by CE marking directives. These requirements apply to all products, even those which are extremely unlikely to pose any sort of safety risk.
There are articles in various places online about the impact of GPSR. For example, a very detailed article here: https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/articles/GPSR.html
Although we fully support the aim of making sure products are safe, the details of how the EU has decided to try doing this are a massive barrier to trade for small businesses outside the EU, due to the large amount of extra administrative work, plus the extra cost of hiring a representative located in the EU.
To make matters worse, at the time of writing the EU does not yet seem to have published guidelines for small and medium enterprises ('SMEs') on how to comply with the GPSR, despite article 17 of the GPSR requiring the EU to do so. Specifically, the GPSR says "The Commission shall adopt specific guidelines for economic operators, with particular regard to the needs of those that qualify as SMEs, including micro-enterprises, on how to fulfil the obligations laid down in this Regulation". We have been unable to locate any such guidelines targeted at SMEs, so either they have not yet been published, or the EU has not made them easy to find.
We did find the following EU parliamentary questions and answers:
- https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-10-2024-002385_EN.html - asked 1 Nov 2024, it includes a question about when SME guidelines will be published. Answered more than 2 months later at https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-10-2024-002385-ASW_EN.html . The answer has links to general guidance about the GPSR, but indicates that specific guidelines for SMEs had not yet been published, even though the GPSR had been in effect for more than 3 weeks at the time that answer was written.
- https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-000145-ASW_EN.html on 4th June 2025. According to footnote 4 of this answer, guidance for SMEs is still not available, nearly 6 months after GPSR came into effect. ("In accordance with Article 17 GPSR, support designed to facilitate compliance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with the GPSR will be made available. In particular, the Commission is in the process of adopting guidelines for economic operators, focusing on the needs of SMEs, including micro-enterprises, on how to fulfil their obligations. Furthermore, in accordance with Article 47 of the GPSR, the Commission is to carry out an evaluation by the end of 2029, where it will assess if the regulation has achieved its objectives while also taking into account its impact on SMEs.")
The lack of information is unhelpful - it is difficult to comply with the GPSR when full details about the best way for us to do that have not yet been made available.
We are hoping to sort out the necessary paperwork and resume selling directly to EU customers at some point, but do not yet have an estimate for when that will be, sorry.
In the meantime, you can still buy items from our EU resellers (although some of them do not stock a very wide range of our products).
Update August 2026
The EU did eventually publish some GPSR guidance for small businesses (but very late, maybe around a year after GPSR came into force?).
Unfortunately, they have also continued to introduce new rules that make it difficult to sell items directly to consumers in the EU, especially for small businesses outside the EU.
- There are the authorised representative requirements for product safety, discussed above.
- For orders with a value under 150 Euros, 3 Euros customs duty is now charged per item type in the package. This duty does not vary based on the value of each item, so even if the item price is only a couple of Euros it will still have a tax of 3 Euros applied. Fortunately, this flat rate is only temporary and is expected to change to percentage rates based on the type of item in 2028, after EU customs reforms are implemented.
- As of 12th August 2026, the PPWR (packaging and packaging waste regulation) will require businesses located outside the EU and selling directly to EU consumers to appoint authorised representatives to hold conformity documentation for packaging and pay contributions to recycling schemes. The requirement is not just for companies that make and supply packaging, it applies to all companies that put products inside packaging, so to every online shop that sells to EU consumers. An authorised representative is required in every EU country that the business sells to, you cannot have just one representative to cover the whole of the EU, and for small businesses outside the EU there are very few exemptions from this requirement for representatives.
There is a good summary of how PPWR affects sellers outside the EU at https://www.datecpackaging.com/blog/packaging-blog-4/ppwr-uk-sellers-shipping-to-eu-59
Many of the PPWR requirements also apply to small businesses located in the EU who are selling to consumers in other EU member states. There are a few thousand complaints about this posted in the feedback section of https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/15352-Packaging-and-packaging-waste-rules-on-national-registers-of-producers_en ...
The PPWR requirements in particular make it completely impractical at the moment for small businesses to sell directly to EU consumers.
If you have an EU company that you can purchase through, we can sell to EU companies.
Otherwise the only option for getting our items delivered to the EU is through our resellers. But different resellers stock different selections of our products, and some resellers (such as Wimo) are not always willing to special order products that they don't normally stock.
We are sorry about this. We would very much like to resume selling directly to EU customers, but this is dependent on the EU simplifying its regulations and making it easier for small businesses (both inside and outside the EU) to comply with them, so based on past performance we are not optimistic about that happening quickly.
In our opinion, the best way to recover costs of handling packaging waste from businesses outside the EU would be a tax on imported packages, collected through the same mechanism as other import taxes, instead of requiring all foreign companies to each hire 27 authorised representatives and sign up to 27 producer responsibility schemes to contribute to the costs. Or at the very least, PPWR requirements should be harmonised to only require one representative and one contribution to cover the whole union, and preferably have thresholds below which no registration or representative is required for businesses only sending small quantities of packaged goods.