The EU recently conducted a "sweep" consisting of a joint EU investigation and enforcement action targeting websites selling consumer goods and their compliance with consumer protection laws.
The sweep action conducted is two-fold: first, national authorities systematically and simultaneously checked these websites for practices in breach of EU consumer law. All the authorities used a common checklist of irregularities that they were looking for. The enforcement action phase will follow upon the investigation phase. During the enforcement phase, authorities will further investigate traders which are suspected of irregularities, and take follow-up action to ensure that non-compliant conduct is corrected and to impose appropriate sanctions.
In this sweep, the goods targeted were consumer electronic goods, including PC related equipment, digital cameras, mobile phones and game consoles, which are amongst the most popular products bought on-line. Twenty-six EU member states (all except Slovakia) as well as Norway and Iceland participated in the electronic goods sweep.
The investigation was aimed at ensuring that these websites and the sales transactions conducted via such websites conformed with a number of EU directives: namely with the Distance Selling Directive which defines some of the minimum information which online traders must provide including the cooling-off period of seven working days; with the E-Commerce Directive which sets additional information requirements related specifically to online shopping; and with the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive which requires traders to display in a clear and intelligible way all the key information that consumers need to have in order to enable them to make an informed choice.
From the results of such investigation, it appears that the most common occurrences in the non-conforming websites were the following: - missing or misleading information about the buyer's rights such as the right to have a consumers' two year guarantee covering the product; misleading or incomplete information about the total cost of the purchase with information on the extra charges only being given at the final payment stage, and missing or incomplete details about the sellers so that they could not be contacted should a problem arise.
In this EU crackdown effort, the results are alarming indeed: over half of all online sellers of consumer electronics in the European Union are suspected of having broken consumer protection laws.
National enforcement authorities are now expected to follow up on these findings by contacting non-compliant companies, which will face potential legal action, demanding that they come into line with the relevant consumer legislation.
This is a wake-up call for companies to take swift action to put their house in order. After all, we are all ultimately consumers at one point in time and deserve clear and fair pricing and no hidden surprises in small print contract terms!
Dr Grech is an associate with Guido de Marco & Associates and heads its European law division.