I got that email too.
This is my reading of it. Hopefully someone will correct anything I’ve got wrong.
It’s about business sellers (but not ‘private’ sellers) needing a licence to send items to Germany, France, and maybe other countries, because of their packaging/recycling regulations.
As I understand it, if I sell just one postcard to a buyer in Germany, in order to be ‘compliant’ I need to have registered with something called LUCID, and then paid something like €39 to a ‘Dual System Provider’ to cover the management and recycling of my little do not bend envelopes in Germany.
And then something similar for France, and any other country that has these regulations.
As I understand it (someone from eBay please correct me if I’m wrong, which I hope I am), even if you use the Global Shipping Programme, you still have to have purchased your own licence.
As I only sell about £50–£80 worth of cards to German buyers each year, the only alternative to paying the licence fee will be to stop offering my items to Germany, or any other countries running a similar system.
It’s not eBay’s fault this has to happen, although you’d hope that, given the increasing competition from ‘private’ sellers, they might consider finding a way of covering this particular extra cost themselves to help the businesses who already generate so much of ebay’s profits.
