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“Because marketplaces are not policing the products all the time, you can find look-alikes or even the same products just being sold under a different name again, very briefly after they’ve been taken down,” said Sylvia Maurer, director of advocacy coordination at European consumer organization BEUC.
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Shein, popular with young and lower-income consumers for its ultra-affordable fashion, showcases around 10 million individual items on its website, with the vast majority from third-party vendors rather than its own brand clothes, estimates New York-based e-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukenas.
“It’s just a massive, massive catalog from all sorts of different manufacturers and sellers, and things you will find are things no person at Shein has manually reviewed to be on the site — it’s just on the site,” said Kaziukenas.
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No one to hold accountable
Marketplaces, as intermediaries, are not liable for the products they sell as they are not the “deemed importer” under European Union law, said Maurer. Her organization is among those pushing for this to change, in the EU’s upcoming customs reform.
Many foreign suppliers get away with selling on platforms with minimal oversight and no EU-based entity, said Gabriela da Costa, partner at law firm K&L Gates in London.
“This leaves the authorities with no one in the Union to hold accountable, compounded by the practical and resource difficulties of enforcing against massive volumes,” she added.
French authorities are investigating online marketplaces Shein, Temu, AliExpress, and Wish for alleged rule breaches that include minors being able to access pornographic content via their marketplaces, the Paris prosecutor said on Tuesday.
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Paris, the global fashion capital, is also increasingly frustrated with platforms selling counterfeit handbags or cosmetics.
“There are, in this massive flow of small parcels inundating our cities and our villages, counterfeit products, unhealthy products, and illicit products,” France’s Foreign Minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, said in a radio interview.
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Same thing with Amazon. While Amazon sells stuff directly, they also allow people of questionable status to sell things as well, and of questionable quality of the merchandise.
As for sex dolls, it may be an embarrassing thing, but I think these “weird” people would be better off using a sex doll than going out and assaulting someone. They’re likely buying that product because they have a hard time meeting people the right way, so they want the quickest means to their ends. I don’t think that’s something we should be taking away — are we telling them that they need to put forth the effort to get a RL girlfriend… or are we delegating them to the next quickest way to get what they want, even if that is to assault a stranger.
As far as who the Union can hold accountable — Shein itself is the obvious answer. If the app or the people under it won’t regulate their content, they accept full accountability by default. The EU can ban the site/app from doing business with the entire bloc if any part of it violates their rules and the site won’t regulate itself.
Those were not regular sex dolls, they were pedo sex dolls. So it’s not about replacing an hypothetical girlfriend.
Your point still stands though, as an argument could be made that maybe allowing pedophiles to own this type of item could help alleviate the urge to sexually assault actual children. You don’t decide to be a pedophile just like you don’t decide to be heterosexual or gay, but you can decide not to act on your paraphilia and become a pedocriminal, and maybe dolls could help.
This needs to be scientifically assessed, although there’s quite an ethics dilemma about testing that hypothesis.
Ah — it should have said that. I would not have made that point had I known that. However, thinking about it… the logic stands well enough. The problem there is, the argument can be made that the person will not stop with the fake doll, though I suppose that argument could be made in either case.
Maybe they should market inflatable couches instead.