- Thursday, 12 November 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
Innovation is a lot like love, everyone knows when it happens, but nobody really knows what it is - Dean 'Mr Segway' Kamen
Eurocrats to make online shopping easier
THE EUROPEAN UNION wants to make it easier for 490 million Europeans to spend their hard-earned cash online.
New legislation being proposed by the EU’s Consumer Commission reckons it should be a lot simpler and safer for citizens to buy items hailing from anywhere within the 27 nation members Online.
Commissioner Meglena Kuneva noted that 56 per cent of Eurozens have access to Internet shopping, and expressed her opinion that a good old online shopping spree should not be hampered by pesky issues like national borders and unnecessary barriers.
Apparently about 150 million Eurozens flash their cash on sites like Amazon.com and Ebay but just 30 million of them buy products from outside their own State, which Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva puts down to a “jungle of complex laws” rather than xenophobia.
“I will table a simplified common set of rules for business to consumer contracts across the EU," promised Kuneva in a speech given today in London. The Commissioner also pledged that the EU was on the case when it came to eliminating unfair online commercial practices, especially by some nefarious travel companies who use pre-checked boxes for adding pricey insurance to tickets. Ahem, cough, Ryanair, cough.
Kuneva also singled out the online airline ticketing business as having misled or ripped off a third of all European customers and told the industry to shape up or face her (legal) wrath.
The Commission has plans to make businesses and consumer organisations set up comprehensive price comparison sites, to ensure fair pricing Europe wide. µ
L'Inq
Reuters
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
It would mean us brits could avoid rip-off Britains extorsion, and get cheap fags from Spain, and booze from France even cheaper than bringing it back by the bootload.

You are looking at expensive shipping, finding ways to pay, and the inevitable 'what to do if my stuff doesn't arrive' question when ordering outside your locality, plus who's going to pay if I need to return it?
In fact it's a consideration for me even when I buy in my country, it's easier to return stuff that's sold locally, and it's cheaper because you pick it up yourself, plus you can pay in good old cash (and the receipt with your purchase info doesn't go linea recta to some american government database either).
So there's a whole lot of issues to overcome.