France is Trying to Ban Wish by Asking App Stores and Search Engines to Block its Apps and Website

Wish has become something of a phenomenon, in the sense that it has become Europe’s go-to place for cheap gadgets, toys, clothing and more, most of which are delivered straight from the PRC to your front door. However, a lot of the products sold on Wish doesn’t meet European safety regulations and now France’s DGCCRF (direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes) or in English, the General Directorate for Competition Policy, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control, are going after Wish for selling substandard and even outright dangerous goods to French consumers.

There is clearly legit reasoning behind it all, as the DGCCRF ordered some 140 different products from Wish – of which most arrived directly from the PRC – and then proceeded to test them to see if they met European safety standards. Out of the 140 products, 45 percent were deemed outright dangerous, although when it came to electronic products, 90 percent were deemed dangerous and 95 percent were not certified for use in Europe. It’s not clear how many of the products were electronic products though, which makes it a bit hard to judge how bad the situation really is.

Other products weren’t quite as bad, but even on the accessory side, 62 percent of the products were considered dangerous. In all fairness to Wish, Amazon and other online shops where third parties can sell their products directly, are likely to have similar, if not quite as bad issues. Wish is said to be proactively removing sellers that are reported to be selling dangerous products, but apparently this wasn’t quite good enough for the DGCCRF, as they feel Wish isn’t taking earlier warnings seriously enough.

As such, the DGCCRF has decided to request that the likes of Apple, Google and Microsoft block access to the Wish app, as well as remove Wish from search engines. This obviously only applies to French citizens for the time being, but as France is an EU nation, it’s possible that an EU wide blockade of Wish could happen in the future. However, if Wish were to implement the changes the DGCCRF wants to see, the block of Wish to French customers would be removed.

However, in a statement provided by Wish to TechCrunch, it seems like the company doesn’t feel that it’s responsible to make sure its third party sellers’ products meet European standards. Wish also seem to think that they already have a good enough mechanism for removing sellers of poor quality products. Overall, Wish is obviously not happy with what the DGCCRF is doing, as they’re losing access to a fairly sizeable market. Time will tell what the long term effect of this disagreement will be, but if nothing else, it might make some more room for shipping other products from the PRC to France.