More than 15,000 potentially unsafe products were removed from Amazon Australia, Catch, eBay Australia, MyDeal, and AliExpress last year.
These marketplaces all took part in ACCC’s Australian Product Safety Pledge, which was launched in November 2020 as a local version of the successful EU Pledge.
The pledge is a voluntary initiative to actively improve product safety online “well beyond the current legal requirements”. The aforementioned five marketplaces also report annually to the ACCC on their performance.
98 per cent of regulator-initiated take down requests for potentially dangerous items were removed within two days, according to the ACCC’s new report.
The marketplaces also used “artificial intelligence, image recognition and automated scanning” to prevent hundreds of thousands of unsafe products from being listed for sale.
“We are pleased to see that pledge signatories continue to use innovative techniques to detect and remove unsafe products from their platforms and prevent them being listed at all,” ACCC Deputy Chair Catriona Lowe said.
“We are encouraged to see signatories taking active steps to create a safer shopping experience for Australian consumers.”
“We urge other online marketplaces to put product safety first by signing up to the pledge,” Ms Lowe said.”
The ACCC cites a 2021 international online sweep by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which found that, of 1,196 banned or recalled products, 1,044 of them were still available to buy online.
“If you’re selling goods online, it’s your responsibility to check the products are safe and comply with Australian product safety laws,” Lowe said.
“Consumers need to be aware that banned, recalled, non-compliant and unsafe products continue to be available for sale online.”
