Online shopping websites slammed for being misleading

By Ben Hurst on Sep 10, 09 01:44 PM

More than 200 European websites selling electronic goods were warned today they face fines or closure unless they clean up misleading consumer information.

The European Commission said a "sweep" of 369 websites selling cameras, computers, mobile phones, DVD players and games consoles had revealed that 55% - 203 - were breaching EU consumer rules.

The unnamed sites include six of the UK 14 and six of the Irish 15 which were included in the "sweep", which was the third carried out by national authorities and co-ordinated across the EU by the Commission.

A Commission statement said: "Traders will be contacted by the national authorities and asked to clarify their position or correct the problems identified.

"Failure to bring a website in line with the law can result in legal action leading to fines or websites being closed."

Two-thirds of the 203 sites tested and found in breach of EU consumer rules are accused of failing to provide full consumer rights information - or none at all - covering compensation for faulty goods and the right to return products during a "cooling-off" period.

Nearly half of them were found to mislead customers about the price of goods, and extra charges - including claims of "free delivery" when delivery was in fact an extra cost.

And one third of the suspect sites failed to provide adequate details about the trader to allow customers to follow up their complaints.

The results of the enforcement action will be published by mid-2010, but in the meantime, all but three of the 28 national authorities taking part in the sweep have declined to name those accused of breaching the rules.

"It is up to each national authority to decide when and how to name the sites under investigation" explained a Commission spokesman. "In the UK, the Office of Fair Trading has decided that the companies involved need time to respond to the claims.

"The idea is that not naming them at this stage is a good incentive for them to change their website information swiftly to avoid being named at all."

Only Norway, Iceland and Latvia have publicly named the websites they checked.

EU Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva said the crackdown was working: "We targeted websites selling electronic goods because I know from my own mail bag, and from the level of complaints coming into European Consumer Centres, that these are a problem area for consumers.

"We discovered that more than half of the retailers selling on-line electronic goods are letting consumers down.

"There is a lot of work to be done in the months ahead to clean up this sector. Europe's consumers deserve better."

Conservative MEP Malcolm Harbour, chairman of the European Parliament's Consumer Protection Committee, commented: "More and more citizens want to shop on the internet to bag themselves a better bargain, but they are unsure whether they are being misled or if they would be protected.

"This sweep clearly shows that more needs to be done to make consumers aware of their rights. They need to know that they are protected, regardless of which website, or which country, they buy from in the EU."

He called for better co-operation between national trading standards authorities in the EU "to ensure that rogue traders cannot slip through the net".