"I only sell B2B" is not a packaging EPR exemption
✓ Last verified against primary sources:
“I only sell B2B” is one of the standard reasons sellers give themselves for not registering for packaging EPR.
It is sometimes right. Usually it is wrong. And the line between the two is not where most people think it is.
The regulation does not ask whether your buyer is a business. It asks what your buyer does with the goods. If they resell them on, the obligation is usually theirs. If they use them, it is yours — company or not.
The question the regulation actually asks
The term that matters is end user.
An end user is anyone the product is supplied to who does not then sell it on in the form they received it. That includes consumers. It also includes businesses buying for their own use.
So run through four buyers:
- A consumer buying a desk lamp. End user. You are the producer.
- An office buying forty desk lamps for its own building. Also an end user. The VAT number changes nothing.
- A workshop buying your tools to use on jobs. End user again.
- A retailer buying forty desk lamps to put on its shelves. Not an end user. They resell.
Three of those four buyers are businesses. Two of them are end users, one is not. So knowing which of your buyers are businesses tells you nothing — and that is exactly why “B2B” is the wrong word for this.
The test is not was my buyer a company. It is did my buyer resell it, or use it.
On Amazon you can see the wrong thing
Here is the practical problem, and it is the reason this article exists.
On Amazon you can tell a business buyer from a consumer, because business buyers carry a VAT number on the order. That is the signal you get.
It is the wrong signal.
A VAT number proves your buyer is a business. It tells you nothing at all about whether they resell your goods or use them. The marketplace gives you perfect visibility of the distinction that does not matter, and none of the one that does.
Which means you cannot sort your buyers into the two categories the regulation cares about. Not because you have not tried. Because the data does not exist on your side of the transaction.
So the answer collapses to one option: register — and, in each of those countries where you have no company of your own, appoint an authorised representative alongside it.
That is not us being cautious on your behalf. It is that no other position can be supported with anything. If a competent authority asked you to justify why you had not registered, “some of my buyers might have been resellers” is not an answer, and you would have no way of making it one.
Where “I only sell B2B” genuinely does hold
It would be dishonest to leave it there, because there is a real version of this.
If you sell wholesale into another member state — pallets to a distributor who then resells your goods on their own market — you are generally not the producer in that country. Across a border, the obligation only lands on you if you supply end users directly. Your distributor takes it on when they put the goods on their market.
A wholesaler shipping to resellers around Europe can be in a very different position from a marketplace seller shipping parcels. Same regulation, opposite answers.
If that is your business, the question worth asking is not “do I register in seven countries”. It is “which of my customers are actually resellers, and can I show it”.
Your own country works differently
One trap for anyone who learns the cross-border rule first.
At home there is no end-user test. If you are the first to supply the packaging on your own territory, you are the producer. Full stop. Sell to a domestic distributor who resells everything you send them, and you are still on the register.
So the “wholesale means no obligation” logic stops at your own border. It never applied inside it.
The two mistakes are not the same size
Over-registering costs money, and more of it than most people budget for. You pay the registration and the scheme fees in a country where you did not owe them — and in any country where you have no company of your own, you are also paying for an authorised representative. That is usually the larger number.
Under-registering costs you the listing. Marketplaces check registration numbers now, and a missing one takes your offers down in that country — see what happens when EPR takes your listings down.
What does not automatically follow is a bill for the years you missed. That threat gets used in sales conversations more than it appears in scheme rules. In France, Citeo’s own rules apply no retroactive declaration to packaging for new members, unlike graphic paper. We have not checked all twenty-seven, so do not assume it either way — but do not accept back-dated fees as a given from anyone who has not shown you the rule.
The two mistakes are still not symmetrical, and that asymmetry is the honest argument for registering when you are unsure. Not fear. Arithmetic.
So what do you do
If you sell to end users on a marketplace, you are the producer everywhere you sell. The business buyers in your order data do not change that, and the VAT numbers on their orders are not evidence of anything relevant.
If you genuinely sell wholesale to resellers abroad, you have a real question to work through, and it is worth working through properly rather than assuming either answer.
And if you do both, they are two separate analyses. Do not let the answer from one channel decide the other.
Related: storage decides your VAT, your customer decides your EPR.
Sources
Primary sources only. Vendor pages are not cited as authority.