EU Advocacy Day participants
Last week seven eBay sellers from the UK, Germany, Portugal, France and Italy traveled to Brussels for two days of discussions on platform bans, the practice of brands restricting or preventing the resale of goods via online marketplaces like eBay. The EU Commission recognizes the importance of online marketplaces for small businesses and cross-border trade, as proven by interests in the digital single market and reducing barriers for SMEs, but platform bans remain one of the major hurdles to European SMEs.
The event kicked off with eBay’s second annual Seller Advisory Forum meeting which gave attending sellers the opportunity to sit down with Paul Todd, Senior Vice President, eBay Europe and other eBay leaders to receive a business update and offer feedback on eBay’s policy and communications strategy. Following the Seller Advisory Forum, the sellers participated in a fireside chat at the E-Commerce Sector Inquiry and Beyond: Ensuring Growth, Competition, and Consumer Choice in the Digital Single Market conference. The conference was organized by the European arm of the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and online seller coalition Choice in eCommerce. During the panel the sellers shared their business stories and discussed in detail their direct experience with platform bans, pleading with EU Commission stakeholders to outlaw the practice. The seller panel was supported by a deep dive presentation into the eBay commissioned study recently released study by Copenhagen Economics, adding analysis and statistics to the conversation and further legitimizing sellers’ concerns in the eyes of policymakers.
In addition to the conference, sellers spoke directly to relevant stakeholders of the EU Commission to again outline the negative impact of platform bans on their businesses and suggest potential courses of action for the Commission to take in order to protect SMEs in the future. Ultimately, positioning seller testimony and economic research components side by side brought a useful and human component to the event, and we hope EU policymakers found the unique opportunity to discuss issues such as marketplace bans directly with real EU SMEs a valuable one.