This mountain of dangerous products included nearly 75,000 toys, 105,000 electrical goods, 38,000 cosmetics and 9,000 e-scooters. Many were destined for online marketplaces – shopping websites where you can buy from third-party sellers.
London’s trading standards body is so concerned about the safety of products sold on online platforms that it has warned shoppers to think twice before buying from them.
Spokesperson Steve Playle said: ‘It is a pretty drastic step for us to take to warn consumers so bluntly to think carefully before buying from online platforms, but we really have no choice. Products that are shipped halfway across the world that are sold at ridiculously low prices really should be ringing alarm bells for all of us.'
Which? is campaigning for stricter rules to prevent the sale of unsafe products. Sign our petition to protect online shoppers:The rise of online marketplaces
Online marketplaces aren’t held to the same standards as traditional retailers and have no clear legal responsibilities to prevent unsafe products being sold.
Yet more of us are shopping on them than ever. More than half of you do so around once a month or more often, our survey in December 2024 found*. Many are drawn by their convenience, big product ranges and quick delivery.
Amazon revolutionised online shopping in the noughties by opening its platform to third-party sellers, allowing small-scale vendors to easily sell products to customers on the other side of the world. It didn’t take long for cracks in the system to appear.
Shanghai-based tech expert David Li says: ‘Amazon didn’t really police its third-party sellers and a huge number of people saw it as an opportunity. That includes back-alley sellers with dodgy practices.’
The number of Chinese businesses selling through Amazon Marketplace has steadily risen, many based in the electronics hub Shenzhen. In the UK they made up 39% of the top 10,000 sellers in December, up from 20% eight years ago, according to Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce research firm.
If something goes wrong with a purchase from a third-party seller based overseas, there is often no one in the UK to hold to account.
Low-cost online marketplace Temu – which has rocketed in popularity since its launch two years ago – lowered the barrier to entry to this global marketplace even more.
‘On traditional e-commerce platforms, you open up a shop, create your listing, advertise it and manage the logistics’, says Li. ‘But if I’m a manufacturer in the 30th city in China, it’s hard for me to hire someone who speaks English and can be responsible for selling on Amazon. Temu looks after the logistics, the internet stuff, the marketing. The factories just take orders and shoulder some of the financial risk.’
Faceless sellers
The abundance of third-party sellers on marketplaces has made it tougher to find out who you’re buying from. Our survey found that only half of those who use online marketplaces check where a third-party seller is based before buying.
It’s not easy to do due diligence, as we found out when we looked at sellers of a sham product – so-called ‘energy-saving boxes’. These plug-in devices claim to work by ‘smoothing’ household voltage and ‘optimising’ the performance of appliances, saving on costs.
Seemingly identical and similar models are still widely available on online marketplaces. We checked out 30 sellers of these boxes on five marketplaces – Amazon, eBay, Temu, AliExpress and OnBuy - and 25 were based in China.
21 gave legitimate company numbers, but we found it impossible to verify addresses using Google Maps, although this could be a translation issue. Only one in five gave an email address even though traders must by law provide consumers with contact information. Eight listed a UK VAT number, but the registered business address for seven was a default HMRC address because the sellers have no UK base.
None had an online presence outside of the platform – no reviews on TrustPilot, no website, no seller accounts with the same name on rival platforms. Three provided no information.
Only one seller gave a UK company number, plus a non-existent London address. When we checked it out at Companies House, we found thousands of mostly dissolved companies have been registered to its company address (a graphic design shop) ranging from machinery manufacturers to petroleum wholesalers.
This seller seemed dodgy, but it was hard to work out if the overseas sellers were, and it would have been almost impossible to track them down if their account closed.
Going undercover
Last summer we tested the faceless nature of online sellers by creating a fake seller account. We wanted to see what sort of controls platforms have to prevent the sale of products, including when there are question marks over who’s selling it.
It took us just minutes to list a dangerous electric heater identical to one recalled by the authorities due to serious safety concerns on Amazon, eBay, Etsy and TikTok Shop.
Only Amazon belatedly removed it, so we reported it ourselves but even then were easily able to relist it on eBay and Etsy, while TikTok failed to remove it entirely until we officially approached it with our findings.
Amazon, eBay and Etsy all told us ‘safety is a top priority’, but none of them closed our seller account even though we had listed and relisted a dangerous product and violated their policies.
When we put our findings to Amazon, Etsy and TikTok, they removed our listing and again told us safety is a top priority. They said they have measures in place to ensure products comply with applicable laws and regulations and their policies, including automated controls and manual moderation.
Weak points in the supply chain
Online marketplaces’ apparent inability to prevent the sale of unsafe products is particularly concerning given the volume of products arriving into the UK.
Trading standards’ ports teams are responsible for stopping unsafe and non-compliant goods from entering the country – an increasingly colossal task. In 2023-2024, 2.4 million unsafe and non-compliant products were refused entry to the UK.
The four-person team at Thurrock Council in Essex covers four ports – including the UK's second-biggest, London Gateway - as well as a UPS fast parcel hub and numerous customs warehouses. The biggest ships docking at Gateway can carry more than 24,000 20-foot containers.
Senior imports surveillance officer Michelle Smith says resources are a challenge and large volumes of unsafe goods are potentially slipping through the net.
‘We’re having to just target the riskiest goods. We cover one warehouse that only stores goods for an online platform – we get lots of unsafe and non-compliant goods there.’ Recently seized products range from telescopic ladders that ruptured on testing to children’s earrings with 8,000 times the recommended amount of lead.
Increasingly, her team finds the importer is based overseas with no UK representative to take responsibility, or that the unsafe goods have been bought cheaply on online marketplaces by UK traders who plan to resell them. ‘They see it as an opportunity and don’t realise the risks of a product or what documentation they need.’
Overseas sellers often channel goods through the UK’s growing network of fulfilment houses. These vast warehouses can be the size of five football pitches, with towering shelves that you need a cherry picker to reach.
Like marketplaces, fulfilment houses aren’t legally recognised as an actor in the supply chain, meaning they have no responsibility for the safety of the goods they store. ‘It seems odd that they can effectively wash their hands of any responsibility’, says the head of National Trading Standards’ ecrime team Mike Andrews. ‘They’re a critical point in the supply chain where it could be quite easy to quickly identify products that are unsafe.’
His team finds that some fulfilment houses don’t track what’s in the warehouse. ‘There’s very little information about what’s in packages other than a generic sticker saying ‘‘headphones’’ or ‘‘hairdryer’’, so it’s difficult to establish what products are inside without opening the packages.’
Another worry is the rise in high-quality fakes on marketplaces. Andrews says they probably catch out people who would never knowingly buy a counterfeit product: ‘If you see a product by a well-known brand with £50 off, you think you’ve got a good deal – it wouldn’t cross your mind to think it might be counterfeit. Consumers need to be extremely wary. If it’s being sold by a third-party seller that isn’t an official shop on one of these platforms, there’s a strong likelihood that the product is counterfeit and unsafe.’
Fatal consequences
The convenience, choice and prices offered by marketplaces are hard to resist, but come at the expense of safety.
Four in 10 of you are confident platforms ensure products for sale are safe, but our investigations repeatedly prove otherwise. We’ve exposed dozens of dangerous products on marketplaces from defective smoke alarms to electric heaters. Most recently, more than half of 23 toys from third-party sellers posed a danger to a child.
The charity Electrical Safety First (ESF) has long warned of fire risks from poorly made e-bike and e-scooter batteries invariably bought on marketplaces. In London, they caused 179 e-bike and e-scooter blazes in 2023, causing three deaths and injuring 60 people.
ESF’s head of public affairs Wayne Mackay says dangerous products sold via online marketplaces is a systemic issue that urgently needs addressing. He says more of us than ever are shopping via online marketplaces, but the law has not kept pace with this shift, leaving the consumer disadvantaged and at risk from dangerous goods.
Will new laws solve the problem?
The huge rise in the number of sellers and in products flooding into the UK through marketplaces and their apparent inability to prevent the sale of those that are dangerous or illegal means new laws are needed.
For years, we've called for marketplaces to be legally responsible for preventing unsafe goods from being sold on their sites, and to ensure there is better enforcement. The Product Regulation and Metrology Bill is expected to become law in summer and could pave the way for a new legal duty on marketplaces.
We believe that’s vital to protect consumers, and want the Bill to be strengthened to ensure these responsibilities are directly addressed, rather than merely enabling legislation further down the line.
You should be as safe shopping online as on the high street. If you’re the victim of rogue traders, online giants should not be able to shrug and walk away.
How to shop safely on online marketplaces
Follow these tips to reduce the chance of purchasing an unsafe product online, plus what to do when things go wrong.
Problem products: Unknown brands: Counterfeits: Unknown sellers: Your rights:*Based on a survey of 13,788 Which? Connect members - 81% bought from marketplaces in the past two years.
News, deals and stuff the manuals don't tell you.source https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/who-are-you-really-buying-from-online-aYVeJ2k48qq8