They are mandated to provide 2-year legal guarantee under EU consumer protection law when they target EU consumers -> i.e. operate an eshop that ships to EU and sells in local currencies. Regardless of where they are located.
That's nice and ideal, but unenforceable in reality unless the company has a presence in the EU.
Law makers aren't stupid: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2025/7728... (the Hauge Convention 2019 has been ratified by the UK has been in effect ~10mo ago).
The UK wants to rejoin the Lugano Convention, too; though, it remains to be seen if EFTA/EU will let them in.
Absolutely not true at all.
Wrong.
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/94249/are-foreign-se...
Shipping from outside doesn’t mean that the buyer doesn’t get protection.
This is clearly nonsense. There is nothing the EU can do to enforce this.
Well they can turn back shipments at customs. And they can collect fines if any leadership of the company comes to the EU. If you stay outside the EU for the rest of your life, you're probably fine.
They can seize your goods. They can order app stores to take down your apps. They can order payment providers to stop doing business with you in the EU.
Most businesses would also prefer to avoid having outstanding fines in foreign countries even if they don't currently have presence there because it's a giant liability in case of looking for funding.
I know that USers think their laws apply everywhere, but that's just a myth.
Everything else is just enforcement.
If you sell medical devices (apparently even down to toothbrushes) in the USA, you have to follow FDA rules. If you sell children's toys in the EU, you've had to follow EU consumer regulations (e.g. CE mark) at least since the 90s. Going back to the 70s, if you sold a physical product in the US as a foreign company you had to follow local rules about maximum delivery times and minimum warranties. If you don't follow the rules, your shipments get blocked at customs, and any marketplaces (Amazon) selling your products get fines as well for not verifying you appropriately, so marketplaces will verify and ban your business too if you blatantly violate local rules (e.g. selling devices containing radios without FCC approval). If you're selling laptops at any scale, you need to follow the local rules for every country you ship to.
There'll certainly be cases everywhere where enforcement isn't perfect (if you contact a tiny vendor in China and they ship to you directly and you sign for & pay the customs yourself, in practice you'll get away with it, or you can always travel to a country to buy a product and carry it back personally) but in the general case local regs on physical product sales are not unusual or optional at all.