this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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What did the government do to cause that?
It's a new packaging law. Every non-Austrian merchant who wants to ship goods to Austria has to have a local notary acting as a representative who has to register the packaging used for shipments with the local authorities and is personally held liable for this. There are local notaries that offer this service for foreign merchants for about €800 per year. However, Austria is such a small market that this most likely eats up all of the revenue from Austrian customers for small merchants, so most just stopped shipping to the country. Of course, large merchants like Amazon easily can handle that fee.
That would go against the EU rules about Free Movement of people and goods (because it treats sellers from other countries differently from austrian sellers).
Maybe it only applies to sellers from outside the EU?!
It also affects merchants from inside the EU. People here are pretty sure that it does violate Free Movement, but since those proceedings for violations can take a few years, for now we’re stuck with it.
In 2025 the EU wants to introduce a similar system for the whole Union, but unified (so one representative for the whole EU). When that comes, the Austrian system will probably be disbanded, and since the EU is significant enough of a trading partner, the whole issue will probably be fixed. However, until then we're stuck with a law-enforced Amazon monopoly.