What eCommerce Regulations are there when selling in the UK?
-
I was informed last night that in a month from now one of my clients is launching some campaigns with a daily deal partner in the UK (Great Britain & New Zealand). (Yes, first time I'd heard of it) Regardless of the timeline, our team is now tasked with making sure we have their site ready for selling in the UK. I just want to make sure we're crossing all our T's and dotting the I's. (We're based in the U.S. and selling all physical products, no digital)
A couple questions came to mind:
- Are we required to display the product prices in the local currency? - I thought this was kind of silly, but the daily deal partner thought this was required.
- VAT - Is it seriously 20% in United Kingdom? And is that flat across the whole area? Would make it a lot easier than the US with 1,000's of different tax rates.
- Any other rules or regulations that come to mind would be greatly appreciated
Thanks in advance for your response!
Have a great day,
Kevin
-
Good info. Thank you!
-
Hi Kevin
Yes the UK has quite a few laws regarding business websites and especially ecommerce sites. Besides what some have advised above you will also have to put an address of a physical location on the website. It is the law that all UK companies and those that trade here disclose their contact details on their website.
-
No problem, glad to help.
With the p
-
Hi Steve,
Thank you for explaining some of the nuances with VAT. We don't seem to sell any of the products in the reduced or zero rate VAT categories.
The postage was also new to me so thank you for bringing that to my attention.
-
Hi Moose,
I really appreciate your reply!
-
Thanks for your response. It was very helpful!
-
Regarding VAT the previous responders are slightyl wrong (sorry).
There are actually 3 rates of VAT in the UK - standard (20%), reduced (5%) and zero rated (0%). It depends what you are selling as to what VAT rate you should apply. The majority of items are 20% but there are some which are lower.
If you are wondering how I know this, our products have a mixture of all three.
Also you need to remember postage as you have to charge or include VAT on your delivery costs at whatever rate the goods are you are sending. So if your goods are 20% then VAT on your postage is also 20%, if it is 5% then delivery is also 5%. However if it is a mix it gets complicated.
As previously mentioned you need to look into the Distance Selling Regulations and to be honest if I saw an item on a site in the UK that wasn't in GBP then there is no way I would buy it.
-
You need to comply with UK consumer law - the main laws which apply are the Sale of Goods Act and Distance Selling Regulations. This page has links to guidance on both issues http://www.tradingstandards.gov.uk/advice/advice-business.cfm
Local Trading Standards offices, who deal with customer complaints in their areas, can be very helpful in making sure your Terms & Conditions comply with UK law. As our business developed we liaised with our local Trading Standards team on these issues, but I'm not sure who you would deal with if you don't have a UK office.
VAT is at a flat rate with the exception of some offshore areas where there is no VAT, and a lower rate applies to certain products/situations. I'm no expert on this but some of our customers have mentioned lower VAT on heating appliances for newbuild properties. You're best off going direct to the UK tax office for information on VAT - http://www.uk-tax-office.co.uk/
Also the European law on cookies is just coming into force, so you need to make sure you're okay on this front as well http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electronic_communications/the_guide/cookies.aspx
-
Kevin, I have previously worked for an agency that has many clients from UK and most of them are related to eCommerce so I have quite a good idea about it!
On-line buyers in UK are a bit different from the buyers in USA; they are more local orientated so if you are not mentioning the price in GBP you should!
About VAT, it was 17% quite a while back but I checked one of the sites has worked on and it says 20% now so, yes on that too!
Thing that you should consider if you are targeting the UK market are:
- You should have a clear Return Policies
- They Love Privacy Policies and Terms and Condition page and I have actually noticed people reading that!
- Details about the product on detail page.
All in all give them less area to ask question from you and provide them enough information to make a decision!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Prevent us.domainname ranking for UK searches
Hi Moz Community, I'd appreciate any advice you can offer on this. We have a client with international offices, and we manage the website and SEO for some of these offices, including UK. Others, such as their US office, are managed by another agency. All websites have the same domain name, but differ in their sub domains depending on their targeted country, e.g. uk.domainname for UK, us.domainname for US. All are .com. The US office's agency re-desgined their us.domainname website earlier this year. We noticed a couple of months ago that the US website started to outrank the uk.domainname website for branded searches on Google from the UK. After some investigation, we found that their agency had incorrectly implemented hreflang tags and set the us sub-domain as the hreflang="x-default" instead of www.domainname. They corrected this and uk.domainname is now the first organic result on Google. However, us.domainname has remained in 2nd place for organic brand searches (from Google UK) for the past two months, when we were hoping that this would have dropped out of the rankings by now. We have asked the US office to ensure that their International Targeting is set to United States in Google Search Console, but have no way of knowing if this has actually been done. Does anyone have experience of this? Is there anything else we could try to stop the US site ranking for Google UK, or is it just a matter of waiting? Many thanks, James
International SEO | | mcmnetjames0 -
Google does not index UK version of our site, and serves US version instead. Do I need to remove hreflanguage for US?
Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
International SEO | | lcourse
We have another US domain with identical content but USD prices which is indexed fine. When I search in google for site:mydomain I see that most of my pages seem to appear, but then in the rich snippets google shows USD prices instead of the GBP prices which we publish on this page (USD price is not published on the page and I tested with an US proxy and US price is nowhere in the source code). Then I clicked on the result in google to see cached version of page and google shows me as cached version of the UK product page the US product page. I use the following hreflang code: rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.domain.com/product" />
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.domain.co.uk/product" /> canonical of UK page is correctly referring to UK page. Any ideas? Do I need to remove the hreflang for en-US to get the UK domain properly indexed in google?0 -
Wordpress SEO/ Ecommerce , Site with Multiple Domains ( International ) & Canonical URLs
Hi I have an ecommerce site with an integrated wordpress instance. I want to have one wordpress site that outputs to 2 domains exactly the same content , but one will have canonical URL . NZ & Australia Sites. So: Would I use the rel="Alternate" hreflang="en-nz" . I want the same content to rank well for each country and not be penalised for duplicate content. Ideas?
International SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
When searching for example.com, only example.co.uk is showing up. Why?
Hi there, I have a quick question, when looking for our client's domain name in Google (Google.it, Google.co.uk and Google.com), we search for example.com, but the first (and only) search result showing is example.co.uk (which redirects then to example.com) Why is the co.uk domain showing instead of the com domain where we are redirecting to? I don't assume that this is any form of penalisation? Thanks!
International SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Huge increase in US direct visits to a UK site, why?
Hi all, My UK website usually gets around 10,000 direct (Direct in Analytics) visits per month however for August this has shot up to 24,000! However the majority of these direct visits seem to be coming from the US and as a result the bounce rate is through the roof, 84%! Why would my UK based site suddenly be receiving huge amounts of US visits? Any ideas?
International SEO | | MarkHincks0 -
Ranking in Different Countries - Ecommerce site
My client has a .com ecommere site with UK-based serves and he wants to target two other countries (both English speaking). By the looks of it, he wouldn't want to create separate local TLDs targeting each country, I therefore wanted to suggest adding subdomains / subfolders geo-targeted to each country that they want to target, however, I'm worried that this will cause duplicate content issues... What do you think would be the best solution? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
International SEO | | ramarketing0 -
Analytics Profile for '.co.uk' extension
What's up Mozzers, I am currently doing some work for a local business in the UK and they've asked me to set-up Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools profiles for them. The site is currently accessible at the following domain extension, 'mydomain.com' and 'mydomain.co.uk'. What is the best way to set this up in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools so I get the most accurate measurement of traffic coming to my website?
International SEO | | NiallSmith0 -
Google UK picking up USA Site
I have a site with two subfolders one is .../uk and one is .../us Part of the content on the two sites is the same and part is unique. The US site's language is set to en and the UK site's language is set to en_gb. I have setup geo-targeting in webmaster tools. The problem is that the home page is a GEO-IP redirect and it seems to be picking up information from the US site even on google uk. I'm not concerned too much about getting the uk site crawled as we submit a sitemap for that anyway. But my concern is that if I setup the geo-ip redirect as a 301 will my UK site loose all of it's ranking? Also am I likely to be penalised for duplicate content?
International SEO | | matthewdolman0