As the law continues to tighten around ecommerce more and more directives are being brought in to improve the shopping experience of the customer. On the whole the online retailers have complied and agreed with the changes made because they have been concerned with fair business practise. However, some new directives that the EU were hoping to introduce were completely nonsensical and therefore received a huge level of rejection from the ecommerce industry.
The proposal of an EU directive that would see all online retailers having to sell to every EU state without question would be impractical and hard to regulate. Payment processing would become a more complicated task and some have argued that it leaves sites open to a greater level of fraud. The second blow then came in the shape of returns, the EU planned to have online retailers pay the return postage for any item with a value over 40 Euros, £34.80, which would be a stretch without the potential added pressure of having to post items to countries all over Europe.
The final proposal was a refund within 14 days which is something that most companies already offer but to make it legislation would mean no leeway and put further pressure on online retailers.
Many online retail associations strongly objected to these new proposals going ahead because they would cause significant problems for the ecommerce market. It is currently being rejected by the EU because of the huge numbers of objection and the fact that it was an unjustifiable change. This has yet to be fully finalised but it looks like this time the online retailers have triumphed over the EU madness.
