Tomorrow is a dark day for small businesses in the UK

[lostmybuttons]

I run a small business, mostly selling on Etsy. But as of tomorrow, Friday 13th December the introduction of the new GPSR legislation is creating such a huge headache for businesses like mine.

We can no longer sell to the EU or Northern Ireland, without paying for an appointed representative to ensure our products are safe. The cost for this is completely unachievable for most businesses like mine. Obviously, we all want our products to be as safe as possible but is it right that it'll cost me at least £2,000 a year to tell me my paper stationery is safe!!

Our only choice is to stop selling to the EU and Northern Ireland, which is a huge loss in income for those already struggling.

We feel like we are shouting into the void and absolutely no one is listening.

This is compounded by the fact that Etsy refuse to separate Northern Ireland in our shipping settings, so by default we are all breaking the legislation and risking fine of up to £20,000.

All Etsy have advised is to cancel any NI orders, which frankly is terrible customer service.

If there was ever a time to shop independent, your small business friends need you now.

Oh I meant to add to the OP, sorry for derailing your thread on GPSR with my anxiety about registering as a sole trader.

NI is in the UK!
It annoys me when people don't understand how this affects those of us who live here. We are on an island.. everything has to be shipped here.. cue price hikes on absobloodylutely everything!

Customers in the EU represent profit for the UK company

@SantaToSSD

It might be worth making another thread.as others will catch it.

May I ask why you don't want to register as self employed? Up to you of course but is it just in case you do hit the 1k threshold?

If you have been under the tax threshold for employment and business you don't pay tax or rather you can choose to pay tax i.e. NI, you only have to pay tax if you earn over your personal allowance. This isn't based on turnover either it is based on net profit.

Even if it is your main income the tax due is only what you would expect.

Hi you are a business if taking over £1000 according to hmrc.

Who came up with this?
Sorry I haven't read the full thread, in case it's been answered.
Sounds shitty for you op, and all other small business.

The EU. It's to protect consumers within the EU. Countries outside the EU need to prove compliance and to have a representative responsible for that and answerable within EU jurisdiction.

So this is another side effect of brexit then.

I can understand why they have done it.

I sell on Etsy (eBay, Amazon, Debenhams, my own website) I design my own jewellery lines some made inhouse, others with a production partner. I've changed my username to post this as I've been helped through some hellish personal stuff over the years and found my feet, it’s not relevant to my business and I don't want associated with my business IYSWIM.

I'm run a micro business, now a ltd company, too. I've spent a lot of time researching appointed people over the last few months. Beyond cost I had a major personal issue with switching off NI.

For lower risk products, there are services that come in at a more accessible price point. As a seller you need to do more of the legwork and create more documentation for approval but many do provide templates to aid this. For some products there don't need to be safety warnings. There are bits in the legislation that say if its not practical to put all the info on products it can be attached to packaging - so I've created sticker sheets for my jewellery boxes and outer packaging. Created user instructions, brief cleaning guides, for my jewellery via google translate for the official EU languages that print at 8point on a single A4 double sided sheet to accompany EU/ NI sales. I've made what I consider to be reasonable efforts.

I've gone with a company called eucompliance partner for $250/year. They're a newish company but checking the owners on linkedin, they do appear to have a compliance background. I have procrastinated over which way to leap for months. I decided that I'm not going to be of interest to EU officials and I've made reasonable efforts to meet the legislation, have a paper trail, a reasonable number of product based in house created risk assessments etc.

I originally did a bulk update to my listings to add the line product available to the EU prior to December 2024 but don't think this is a long term strategy. My main business focus is eBay and I’ve been reassured by eBays stance that they wont be banning sellers without warning but I also think having an appointed person works as a medium/ long term business strategy.

I started researching the four named companies within the ebay seller centre GPSR page. My category is precious metal and gemstone jewellery so low risk products, a catalogue of around 800 items:

• Webinterpret (currently eBay only)
• Cert-Rep
• Obelis
• Eucerep

Webinterpret I filled in an online form to book a call, I promptly received an email to confirm someone would be in touch, followed by a confirm your subscription to our emails email – a week has passed no contact Cert Rep had simple pricing on their website so I didn’t make contact 1190Euro/ year for under 5000 items Obelis came back promptly to an enquiry their fees are 95 Euro/ month plus 750 Euro deposit (refundable over time) plus a one off fee of 1730 Euro/ ten products which includes some testing (if they deem it necessary) – I don’t think any is necessary making them very pricey for my items Eucerep I filled in an online form and received email confirmation someone would be in touch soon – I’ve not heard anything.

On another thread, since doing my research, Eucerep came in at I believe around £400 for another low risk seller with only a small number of product groups.

In parallel I contacted the top few companies who came up in a google search:
EUcompliancepartner.com who have a $250/ year flat rate
ia-group.ltd who have a £420/ year charge for low risk products
certification-experts.com who I filled in forms for but haven’t given me any pricing yet
take-e-way.de who I filled in forms for but again no response yet
VATai.com who are offering a deal of 100Euro/ for eBay sellers and say they’ve done some work with eBay Japan and appear to have reasonable reviews for some of their other services. You need to go on live chat to get this deal as the advertised price is 400Euro.

If I was just eBay, I'd have gone with VATai at the equivalent of £6.40/ month, for peace of mind to not have anything restricted and keep trading to NI and EU. As I'm multichannel I’ve gone with EUcompliancepartner.

Since adding their details to Etsy, I covered the annual cost in sales generated to EU already.

I'm not happy about having to pay out but I feel morally more comfortable not switching off part of our nation and consider it a lesser of evils to avoid contracting my business.

As an aside, when EPR Germany came in, I contemplated switching off Germany but the 39 Euro/ year for Lizenzero reporting brings in a good few thousand a year - growing at a faster rate than my domestic sales year on year. Also sales had a significant jump more than pre EPR due to so many people turning off.

From a different perspective, I do worry about things like magnetic tile toys for children that come from China and can be swallowed because they come apart. How is a consumer supposed to know what’s safe when it isn’t always even clear where products come from?

Thank you for not taking a "fuck NI" approach to selling/trading.

No it isn't that I have any concern re being self employed (though it seems a rather grandiose title for what has been basically me, fiddling about, doing my hobby, and making a bit of money from it) and I am pretty certain I haven't crossed a tax threshold. I don't earn anything outside Etsy now. I don't even need to pay NI (fully paid up). The concern is simply that I believe I may have earned over 1k in the past and I will be fined for not registering as a sole trader if I attempt to do the right thing now and register.

Make sure that you only buy goods with a CE mark on the packaging. It indicates that the product meets the European Union's safety, health, and environmental protection standards, which are very high.

(The UKCA mark is the equivalent UK mark of regulatory approval. It was introduced post-brexit but most businesses don't want to duplicate effort, so they just get CE certification, which the UK as a matter of real-world commerce has had to accept.)

But you don't know if you have earned over 1k before now so you can register as someone who is only just now hitting the 1k sales because you do know what your sales are for this year. Essentially although you have been trading, as you've not realisitically hit the thresholds for HMRC you didn't need to register earlier.

If you want that is, it's worth taking the time to look further into it but it is easy to overthink it.

Do you have any sales info for previous years on Etsy so you can check?

Yes, dh and I have been checking. The trouble is, nowadays I buy all my postage labels from Etsy so that cost is automatically deducted from my earnings. Back in, say 2020 (a bumper year for me because of lockdown and all the online buying people did) I wasn't buying my postage from them so I have no idea how much to deduct. I suppose I could check my bank account? But even then, I would have to deduct the cost of materials and have absolutely no record of that at all. So I can't prove one way or another what my net earnings were. Dh thinks proving figures is critically important.

I would love to just contact HMRC and say 'i've been trading in a small way for a few years but now my business is taking off and i need to register' and believe that they won't look back at past earnings or ask any questions but the fear is they will delve back and slap a fine on me.

There are two things, past reporting and this year, 2024. From this year marketplaces automatically report turnover above 2000 euro after site fees are deducted (love that the figure is euros!). So if you check your Etsy sales this year on your seller dash and it's over £1700 for past year, Google self assessment registration, and follow the links. Its a simple online process and for a very small business (under £10k) not a lot of info is required on your simplified self assessment - just summary figures. You do need to keep a bit of a paper trail and the platform forums are full of people who can advise what they do, it doesn't need to suck the joy from your business, once you've got a system in place. Creating an online profile with HMRC does require a bit of taking photos of documents getting codes in the post etc (unless it's simplified from when I did it) but you only need to do that once.

Many businesses will go under if they can only sell in the U.K.

We are about to implement a solution to this - we sell to the EU via a Shopify store. We have half a dozen product lines (most of which have multiple variants, but identical materials across those variants), so have to make those compliant and have a representative based in the EU.

We already use a plug-in service which handles all EU VAT etc, and they have been brilliant - edited all products initially, set up the checkout process, and then seamlessly calculate and settle all EU tax stuff for us. Very reasonable cost. They have now added a GPRS service. If we only had a couple of product lines, it would be a few hundred quid. For multiple ones there is a package price of €1700 per year. For this they will assess our existing products and do the initial generation of compliance templates - with our input, I assume - and then represent us in the EU.

For us, it’s a very reasonable cost.

No one said democracy is cheap, we all expected some hiccups as we adjusted to life after 50 years in the Single Market.
With Brexit we have taken back control of our borders, we have taken back control of our laws, and gained freedom from the protectionist and bureaucratic EU so we are free to trade anywhere in the world!
It has all gone remarkably smoothly, and even Keir Starmer agrees despite his reservations whilst in opposition!

Bless.

Lol people can't even sell to one of the UK's countries.

And that's a big issue for some of us, NI is an important market for me.

No one said democracy is cheap
The government's definitely said that "no one voted to be poorer. It seems in fact that they did.

we have taken back control of our borders
We can no longer return asylum seekers back across our borders to the EU because we've left the Dublin Agreement. That's why we now have a flotilla of small votes crossing the channel. And net migration across our borders is far higher than it's ever been because we actually need migrants. Although we do have a new trade border within the UK - although as for control we didn't have any control over that decision.

we have taken back control of our laws
We are de facto following EU law over which we now have no control because it makes no sense not to follow it. We've just given up our seat at the table where the law is made. We've become a rule taker. This entire thread is about the impact of a regulation made in Brussels over which we have no control any more.

and gained freedom from the protectionist and bureaucratic EU
Look around the globe. Every country has protectionist trading policies. It would be crazy not to. This thread is about the problems created by being outside the trading bloc of our own continent. We were far better off inside the charmed circle of the single market with which we do 48% of our goods trade. We're now struggling to overcome the barriers to that market because we chose to step onto the wrong side of them.

so we are free to trade anywhere in the world!
The thread shows we are not - we aren't even free to trade within the UK any more.

That was the point Holly was making, if you look at the post she was responding to!