> but no indication of what that means.
That’s the point. There are 27 member states that each have their own regulations that need to be complied with.
The article has more details than your comment implies, such as the fact that some states like Spain have ongoing recurring fees too.
Dealing with changing regulations and fees that are different across 27 states on top of all of the other EU regulations is normal for a big company with a lot of staff and lawyers, but if you’re a small company trying to ship any product you have to start maintaining a list of individual states where you think you can break even and decide if it’s worth doing all of the work to try to sell there.
If you’ve never had to deal with regulatory compliance or shipped physical products this all probably does sound like whining to you, but that’s only because you don’t know how hard it is to comply with regulations for 1 EU state, let alone 27 of them multiplied by all relevant regulations.
the article really doesn't have enough details. the different regulations per country are the least of the problem. the real whammy is having to have a representative in each country, which will cost money every year in every country, not just in some. see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49485957
But how is it different? Because I live in one of those 27 member states, and I'm pretty sure that we had our own regulations before, that they were different from the other 26 states, and that any companies doing business here had to comply with them. Or is it that they were not complying with regulations before and now they will have to?
Before: you make a thing, you stick it in box and mail it to someone in another EU country. Fees paid: postage.
After: for every one of the 27 EU countries you plan to ship to, you must pay hundreds or thousands of euros in registration fees as a packaging producer.
Somehow, regulation believers who think they are sticking it to the big man think this is a reasonable system, and not a complete killer of small time entrepreneurship for those not fortunate enough to have millions in capital.
Do you, is that what the law is? I've seen enough propaganda flying around to not just take this on faith. What happens whenever two countries differ on any other regulation and one company sells outside its home country?
What is the question? Instead of going straight for the insinuations of Russian propaganda and whatever you could just have looked it up for yourself.
How about Spanish-Portuguese specialty horse riding gear? https://picadera.de/en/ppwr-warum-wir-nicht-mehr-in-die-eu-v...
How about organic children's clothes from Sweden? https://shopdunssweden.se/
A solid bike lock made straight out of German engineering? https://www.pitlock.de/en/blog/post/eu-packaging-regulation-...
I could find these all day but let me just remind you that for literally _DECADES_ before this regulation there were no such restrictions to cross EU online shopping. Now the small players have closed entirely, and the more fortunate can only afford to serve the largest countries such as Germany, Belgium, Netherlands. It's insane.
And to add insult to the injury, substandard alternatives to all of these products are still readily available on Temu. They are fucking laughing at us in China!
I have yet to see any evidence beyond angry internet comments that registering in every country is actually required.
You are free to pretend you know better than SME's all over the union, their chambers of commerce, actual CUSTOMERS dealing with this, but evidently business has already ground to a halt anyway.
This is exactly what I mean by regulation believers. Here you have all the evidence you need that the harm is done, yet you believe it's still about some philosophical debate whether the regulation even works that way.
No, the evidence is that some people are overly paranoid and the rest would like to clear up the wording to bypass the paranoia. The same thing happened with GDPR.
Like I said, you are focusing on irrelevant semantics. The single market is already dead, you just didn't realize it yet.
Well, yes and no. They tried making exemptions for micro-businesses, but they are not exempt from the law completely. The administration costs can be bigger than your estimated profit for a certain country.