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Comment by johndoe0815 | Hacker News Reader

"This item does not ship to Germany" :(

Not sure if this is a configuration problem on Tindie or a consequence of a missing CE logo...

I don't have experience with such category of electronics, but anecdotally small online sellers in my country (USA) often have troubles complying with German customs - there seems to be a high rate of packages returned to sender due to various intricacies of German import law. (Such as the 'Packaging Act' [1])

[1]: https://packhelp.com/german-packaging-act/

> This applies to every single company – regardless of its size - and notably includes licensing (or participation) in a dual system.

This is insane even by German standards.

Agreed, this seems a likely explanation to me. I run a small hobby electronics business in my free time and although I ship some items to the EU I explicitly don't ship to Germany due to the additional complexity there; it's simply not worth my time for maybe 3 additional orders a year.

I'm sure the regulation is well-intentioned (and could even be great in aggregate effect too!), but a side-effect is that it biases the market in favor of larger companies who can afford to hire compliance specialists.

If you look at it from the German perspective, I think a person who is in/from Germany and has a small online hobby electronics shop would not be impacted by this the same way you are - thus, I believe the side effect you mention could be seen as biasing the market in favor of domestic small entities, as opposed to international ones, which might be good for a self sufficient economy. Feature not a bug, basically, is my suspicion. Although I suspect the intended target is more likely to be on Aliexpress than Tindie.

I follow another small project who had to stop shipping from the UK to the EU from Tindie, because Tindie wasn't handling the VAT requirements that brexit opened them up to.

I can't promise I'm up to date on that - that was two years ago, but they're still selling to the EU from their own site, and rest of world from Tindie. So I'm working to the assumption that they wouldn't still refuse EU sales from Tindie unless they felt they still needed to.

There was no shipping to US. Entered email to be notified when US shipping was available. A few minutes later, it was added.

The gerber files and software is open source. Just order you own from your preferred pcb fab.

No shipping to Norway, either.

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