Survey of online retailer/fulfilment house

Recolight studied the extent of online freeriding in the UK.  To do this, Recolight chose an online retailer/fulfillment house, and ran a search on “LED bulb”.  This revealed the following:

• 91 of first 120 records were freeriders (The producer was not listed on the UK register of WEEE compliant companies, published monthly by the Environment Agency)
• Of those 91 freeriders:
  • 15 were EU based
  • 2 were US based
  • 74 were China/Hong Kong based
• Of those 91 freeriders:
  • 65 had product available for next day delivery.  This implies that the non-compliant stock was already held in a UK based warehouse.
  • Virtually all items listed were multi-packs of LED bulbs, with large numbers of recent English language reviews, implying large numbers of sales.

The study was completed in September 2017.