1.1 The Nordic Enforcement Group
The Nordic enforcement projects are run by the Nordic Enforcement Group, a subgroup of the Nordic Chemicals Group, under the Nordic Council of Ministers. The main purpose of the Nordic Enforcement Group is to exchange experience on control and enforcement of the European chemical legislations and to prepare and carry out common enforcement projects.
This project was launched early 2022 and was finalized in July 2023. The main responsibility for the project was allocated to the Norwegian Environment Agency and the project leaders were Loella Bakka and Ingvild Kvien. Participants from the other Nordic countries in the project group were Karin Rumar, Daniel Ahlström, Sofia Bejgarn, Amanda Rosen and Karina Zaluska from the Swedish Chemicals Agency (KEMI) and Markus Koponen and Helena Ritamäki from the Finnish Safety and Chemicals Agency (Tukes).
1.2 Enforcement of e-commerce
The e-commerce is continuously growing. According to a report by the trade association E-commerce Europe, it is expected that online sales will account for an average of 30% of the European retail turnover by 2030 (E-commerce Europe, 2022). In the Nordic countries, 87% of the internet users bought goods or services online in 2022, which is the highest share in Europe.
The enforcement authorities must keep pace with this development and continue to include control and monitoring of e-commerce as part of their enforcement activity. New IT-tools and programmes are developed, which can facilitate the monitoring and enforcement activities of surveillance authorities. One of the major challenges for the enforcement authorities is that companies can trade in a country without being within the jurisdiction of the national enforcement authorities. The companies can be located outside the EU/EEA or in another EU/EEA-countries. The latest requires a close cooperation between the national authorities.
In 2020 the Nordic enforcement group published the report "Nordic project on enforcement of internet trade" (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2020). The work from 2020 is continued in the current enforcement project. Since then, the number of e-commerce actors are continuously growing and new ways to organise the trade has grown in importance (platforms, dropshipping, chatGPT etc.). Dropshipping is a rapidly increasing business model and is presented as a low-risk and easy way to start a business. This model, which was not part of the previous Nordic joint enforcement project, had a special attention in this project and in this report.
New EU legislations like the Digital Service Act ((EU) 2022/2065), the Market Surveillance Regulation (EU (2019/1020)) and the General Product Safety Regulation ((EU) 2323/988) give new provisions for the e-commerce actors and is looked into in this project.
1.3 Objectives of the project
The goal of this project was to do a check of the compliance level of e-commerce, explore and collect best practices of each country to enhance our work regarding enforcement of e-commerce of consumer goods and get a closer cooperation between the Nordic market surveillance authorities. We gathered experience on enforcement of different types of actors, explored the new legal framework as well as shared enforcement experiences, including the use of different IT-tools and enforcement strategies.