Buying directly from a factory abroad has become as easy as buying from a shop in the same city.
The price difference is substantial and is not entirely explained by production cost.
Many enter below a value at which and inspection do not apply.
That was designed for gifts and occasional personal imports, not for a supply chain.
A domestic retailer selling the same item pays , tax and the cost of .
The resulting gap is a regulatory subsidy for the distant seller rather than an efficiency.
Closing it is administratively harder than it sounds.
Collecting a small on millions of costs more than the unless the platform collects it at .
Several jurisdictions now require exactly that, which works where the platform is large and fails where it is not.
Product safety is the harder problem and receives less attention than the tax.
An item that fails a domestic standard cannot be sold in a shop and arrives daily by post.
are impossible when the seller is a name on a listing that no longer exists.
Making the platform for the safety of what it lists changes the incentive immediately.
Platforms resist on the ground that they are a venue rather than a seller, which is the same argument every intermediary has made.
Whether it succeeds this time depends on whether a court finds the distinction meaningful when the platform also sets the price, the ranking and the delivery.