Placing goods on Northern Ireland Market
Can someone please clarify some wording for me. So I see that products placed on the GB market (and that require the mark) must have a valid UKCA mark, at least by the end of 2022… but you can start using it now if you want to. Goods placed on the Northern Ireland market must continue to have CE mark as they’re following EU rules. Therefore if you have a product being placed on the market to the whole of the UK you require a CE mark and UKCA (from 1st Jan 2023)…
now this is my question… as it’s confusing to me…
If I manufacture a product in England… and have a UKCA mark on it…, and then a customer buys that product via Amazon UK and Amazon ship it to Northern Ireland is that placing it on to the NI market? What I’m trying to work out is if they mean place onto the market they mean in a physical retail setting in NI… or are they saying if a customer from NI can buy that item from a England based seller, either via Prime or us posting direct, it requires the CE mark as well.
0 replies
Seller_BS5lg2keRs2QO
Section 2.2 / 2.3 of the “Blue Guide” at the EC website seems the most definitive description of what placing on the market means. (you want the EN version unless you’re particularly good at another language)
https://ec.europa.eu/docsroom/documents/18027/attachments/1/translations
I would say that:
“Products offered for sale online by sellers based outside the EU are considered to be placed on the Union market if sales are specifically targeted at EU consumers or other end-users. The assessment of whether or not a website located inside or outside the EU targets EU consumers has to be done on a case-by-case basis, taking into account any relevant factors such as the geographical areas to which dispatch is possible”
Obviously it leaves room for subjectivity, but personally i would say that it is hard to argue that listing a product on Amazon which can be shipped into NI since NI cannot be excluded for FBA (i’m pretty sure?) means it is being placed in that market.
Seller_PUgTge8LPB8FY
My understanding is that, by listing a product as available for sale in (or into) Northern Ireland, you are indeed placing it on the NI market. If you didn’t wish to sell to NI, you could exclude NI from your shipping templates. That way, no one from NI would be able to buy from you.
That doesn’t work for FBA, of course.
