On Wednesday 3 November, the trade association LightingEurope published the results of an exercise carried out by mystery shoppers to check that lighting products offered online to consumers comply with EU laws and mandatory information requirements.
Conducted on four platforms across five Member States – France, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland and Spain – the exercise revealed that only 8% of the top 20 search results generated by the algorithm comply with EU rules.
“The results are worrying. (...) Customers are being offered products that do not have a CE mark, that do not have an energy label or have the wrong label, or that do not pay for the collection and recycling of the product at the end of its life”, said LightingEurope’s secretary general, Ourania Georgoutsakou.
The mystery shoppers also purchased about 30 lighting products online. After inspecting them, the outcome was that almost 77% of them did not comply with EU legislation.
“We need to change the EU legal framework so that we can tackle non-compliant products online. The Digital Services Act (DSA) (see EUROPE 12823/10) must clearly assign responsibility for all forms of non-compliance”, concluded Georgoutsakou. (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)