You are the importer now

The moment you buy from a factory in China and sell to someone in Britain, you become the importer. Not your supplier, not your freight forwarder, not the marketplace. You.

Nobody says this out loud when you place the order. It arrives later, usually as an email from a customs broker, or a listing suspension, or a letter about packaging waste from a body you had never heard of. If you are running the whole company yourself, this is the part with no colleague to hand it to.

There are eight gates between your pallet and a legal sale. The order they bite in is the whole lesson.

The eight

1. A UK presence. A GB address on the product or packaging, with a named party here accountable for it. A freight forwarder's address is not a presence.

2. A conformity mark. UKCA or CE, depending on your category and whether you are shipping into Great Britain or Northern Ireland. The mark is the last step, not the first: behind it sits a signed Declaration of Conformity and a technical file you can produce on request.

3. Electrical safety. Anything mains-powered needs a BS 1363 plug fitted, not an adaptor in the box. Add RoHS, EMC, and radio approval if there is Bluetooth or wifi inside.

4. English labelling. Warnings, instructions and importer details, in English, on the product itself — not in a PDF you email afterwards.

5. A GB EORI number. Without it nothing clears customs. Most people meet this gate when a container has already stopped moving.

6. UK VAT. Overseas sellers register from the first sale. There is no threshold to sit under, and the marketplaces will ask for the number before they let you list.

7. Producer responsibility. WEEE for electricals, plus packaging and battery obligations. These are ongoing registrations, not one-off forms.

8. Consumer law. Fourteen-day cancellation on distance sales, with the Consumer Rights Act sitting over the top of whatever your returns policy says.

Why the order is the lesson

Almost everyone starts at gate two, because it is the one that feels like progress. A lab, a certificate, something to show the factory. Real money leaves the account and something arrives in return.

Then gates one, five and six turn out to need weeks of paperwork nobody can compress, and stock that was ready in March cannot be sold until the summer.

Gates one, five and six are cheap and slow. Gate two is expensive and fast. Start the slow cheap ones first and run the expensive one alongside them. That single reordering is worth more than any supplier discount you will negotiate this year.

What this cost us

Our own stack is the boring proof: UKCA and CE, RoHS, EMC and Bluetooth approval on the lamp, UK VAT plus registrations in Germany, France and Poland, EPR under LUCID, and appointed UK and EU representatives. None of it was interesting. All of it was load-bearing.

One thing worth saying plainly, because it is true this week: our Amazon seller account is suspended and has been through appeals. Sales continue on our own storefront, because the compliance sits with the company rather than the channel. A marketplace can pause you with little notice. These eight gates are what let you keep trading when one does.

One step this week

Find out whether your category needs UKCA, CE, or both, and write down who your named UK party will be. Not the certificate — the name and the address. That one answer unblocks gates one, four and seven, and it costs you an afternoon rather than a lab fee.

This is the map as I use it, not legal advice. Check current OPSS and HMRC guidance for your own category before you commit stock. The rules move.

If a gate has caught you out, reply and tell me which one and what it cost you in weeks. The ones that repeat become a letter.

Jason One-Person E-Commerce Co