Break down the cross-border barriers

“This is a huge growth opportunity. It’s so much simpler to trade remotely into Europe than open a chain of stores… with the weak pound there’s an active market out there that would sooner buy from the UK than locally… but there are some big regulatory and distribution hurdles.”

That was Shop Direct Group chief executive Mark Newton-Jones speaking at the British Retail Consortium’s Multichannel Retailing Conference last week.

Certainly the European Commission wants more cross-border internet trade, saying it makes the single market more real for citizens and allows them to access the best deals from all over the EU.

UK consumers are Europe’s biggest online shoppers. Most other EU states are way behind so there’s a lot of future business out there and many retailers want to tap into it. But it’s often not that easy.

Some of the practical barriers are largely unavoidable - delivering a wardrobe to Greece is never likely to make sense. Then there are variations in tastes, languages, electrical voltages - but other difficulties can and should be reduced.

Take VAT, for example. If your total online sales to a member state exceed a threshold (the figure varies from state to state) you have to levy VAT at the destination country’s rate. So small-scale traders are unaffected but multiple tax rates are hell for a big or expanding retail business.

Sell electricals and you have obligations under the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive but the requirements are different in different countries. You can hardly run a take-back scheme in Spain from a UK website. The usual conclusion is this category just isn’t worth the trouble.

On these, surely a UK retailer should only have to meet UK rules?

Then there are consumer rights. If you’re deemed to be ‘targeting’ customers in other member states you have to understand and comply with the local law in each of those states. That could be 27 different regulatory regimes across the EU.

One direct retailer that’s targeting just three other EU states says the extra cost will be 15% of the first year’s turnover.

They’re actually setting up offices in each of those countries to house the local lawyers they’ll need.

The BRC has long campaigned for the EU to establish one consumer rights regime. The UK Government agrees and, if the Consumer Rights Directive is passed in the form proposed, that’s what we’ll get.

But some states are against the proposal for a united regime. They say their consumers would end up with less protection than now. And, I suspect, there’s a bit of protectionism going on there too: fear of the impact of familiar UK brands on their markets.

The wrangling’s putting a huge brake on the development of cross-border business. I say get on with it. Even harmonising some rights is better than doing nothing.

Stephen Robertson is director-general of the British Retail Consortium