posted on March 1, 2007 12:22:02 PM new
We had several auctions ended today from Ebay UK for a Vero violation. Ebay provided an e-mail address to the manufacturer of the item, so we contacted them to ask why they wanted ebay to end our auctions.
Their response said " The EU law prohibits the sale of product into a country when there is a licensed, exclusive distributor if that product was not purchased directly from the distributor. We have distributors in most EU countries. Our UK distributor asked that the auction be ended."
We do not buy this item directly from the manufacturer but through one of their wholesale distributors.
Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions on how we should handle this? or do we have any rights at all? Their items are a very good seller for us in the UK.
posted on March 1, 2007 12:30:25 PM new
Exclude Europe from your ship to locations to aviod the VERO claim. (your buyers will have to find you on the US site)
posted on March 1, 2007 12:45:09 PM new
'Their response said " The EU law prohibits the sale of product into a country when there is a licensed, exclusive distributor if that product was not purchased directly from the distributor. We have distributors in most EU countries. Our UK distributor asked that the auction be ended."
We do not buy this item directly from the manufacturer but through one of their wholesale distributors.'
Where is the distributor that you buy from located? If the distributor is located in the UK, there should be no problem.
posted on March 1, 2007 12:53:53 PM new
More facts:
We are located in the USA.
The manufacturer of the item is located in the USA.
We are listing this item directly on the Ebay UK site. Their UK distributor is the one complaining.
If you need more info... let me know.
Found this in one of the ebay e-mails:
Please note: Parallel import laws may prohibit the unauthorised importation of branded products into certain countries. Sellers who intend to ship branded items outside of the country for which the item was intended for distribution may be required to get authorisation from the trademark owner to sell those items in other countries. This may be true even if the item is genuine and legal to distribute in the seller's country.
posted on March 1, 2007 01:29:30 PM new
Why dont you contact the manufacturer and hear what they have to say?
It sounds like its UK distributor is guarding its territory,land and cyberspace!
You can as one post suggested,list it on Eaby-USA and hope the UK bidders will find your item!!
The response we posted above was from the manufacturer.
" The EU law prohibits the sale of product into a country when there is a licensed, exclusive distributor if that product was not purchased directly from the distributor. We have distributors in most EU countries. Our UK distributor asked that the auction be ended."
That is all they said in their e-mail to us.
Based on the info in ebays emails concerning "Parallel import laws" then the manufacturer is the one that should give us permission and not some EU law violation.
We noticed that ebay didn't cancel all the items we had listed from this manufacturer. We went can changed the item ship to location to UK only. Do you think we should cancel the rest? We noticed that several other people had the same item list on the UK site and they just listed UK only.
we just e-mailed the manufacturer again with this response:
Thank you for your answer. We do have another question.
Do you have any company policy prohibiting the sale or shipment of your products from the USA to other countries? For example: If someone from the UK buys a one of your products from our web site are we supposed to refuse and cancel the sale because you will not allow USA companies to send items abroad?
here is their response:
Under the US trade rules you are allowed to sell the product to any country in the world. However, once the product leaves our soil it is now under the guidelines of the country that it is going into. It is illegal to import the product into the UK if there is a distributor and it wasn’t purchased from that distributor.
