Dear Chair, honourable members, fellow speakers, ladies and gentlemen,

Thank you for your invitation to address this Committee today.

My name is Amber Bechrouri and I am responsible for Amazon's policy in Europe around consumer, product and sustainability issues. I have been working on these issues for 25 years. We welcome this opportunity to exchange views on how to ensure protection for European consumers through safer products, better controls, and more robust enforcement. These issues matter deeply to me, and they matter to Amazon because we know that customer trust is built on safety and compliance.

Amazon's Role in Europe

Let me start with some brief context on Amazon's presence and commitment in Europe. We've been here for almost 28 years — today employing over 150,000 people across the EU and helping more than 100,000 EU-based small businesses reach customers across Europe and beyond.

Europe is also home to some of our most exciting innovations. Alexa, for example, was developed at our Research & Development centre in Gdańsk, Poland. And on sustainability, we're putting investment behind our ambitions — we use AI to choose the right-sized box for every order, which has helped us eliminate over 2 million tons of unnecessary packaging worldwide since 2015.

Our Unique Perspective on Product Safety

When it comes to product safety, it's important to understand that Amazon operates across the entire product value chain. We are a manufacturer — making devices like Echo and Kindle, as well as own-brand essentials like coffee and nappies.

We are also a retailer, an e-commerce marketplace, and a logistics provider. These many roles give us a unique, end-to-end perspective on what works — and what doesn't — when it comes to delivering for EU consumers, alongside you. I want to underline that we take our compliance responsibilities extremely seriously, because it’s the right thing to do for our customers and in the long term, it makes business sense.

I will hand over to Thomas to explain our compliance work in more detail.

Our Compliance Principles and Practices

My name is Thomas Winkler and I lead the teams who ensure that every product on Amazon in Europe is safe, authentic, and compliant. We are scientists, engineers, risk managers, software developers - based in Germany, Italy, Romania, Luxembourg and elsewhere in the Union, and we work hard to ensure a trustworthy shopping experience for our customers.

Having been with Amazon for 20 years, I can attest that customers shop with us because they trust our products. There are no shortcuts to customer trust - you can only earn it by doing hard things well, over and over again. That is especially true in product compliance. And when we made mistakes in the past, customers have gone elsewhere to shop. Applying the highest product standards is not only the right thing to do; it makes business sense. That is why we have invested over 1 billion Euros worldwide to ensure a trustworthy shopping experience.

Let me explain how we put this into practice:

  • First, we verify all sellers when they register with us, and we monitor their ongoing activity in real-time, using technology, across every product, order, and interaction. In fact, we implemented Know Your Business Customer verification over a decade before the DSA made similar requirements mandatory.
  • Second, before a product is listed, we require compliance and safety documentation. And for higher-risk products, such as toys, we work directly with accredited laboratories to ensure safety testing. We do not simply comply with laws; we innovate on top of them. We embraced the General Product Safety Regulation, and informed hundreds of thousands of small businesses, manufacturers, and importers of their upcoming obligations before GPSR went into effect. We developed custom imaging technology in our warehouses across Europe, to verify that physical products comply with the law, and to provide safety information to customers before purchase. Last year, we verified over 12 million products using this technology.
  • Third, when something somewhere goes wrong, we act proactively and decisively to keep consumers safe. When an Australian authority a few months ago warned about asbestos contamination in children's play sand, we temporarily removed 25,000 playsand products from our EU stores, we tested products through accredited labs, and where we found similar contamination, we informed EU authorities to ensure these products would be also removed from other online and offline retailers. Small businesses, who sell on Amazon and elsewhere, consistently tell us: Amazon, you have the strictest product policies and the toughest product controls. And this matters to us, because it’s about protecting European consumers.
    Thank you.

Recommendations

To conclude, we strongly believe that European consumers should be safe and well protected, wherever they buy - whether on or offline. We are aligned with you on that objective, and acknowledge the important work you did through your recent resolution on Product Safety. We regularly engage with governments and regulators who share our desire to work collaboratively.

We participate in voluntary product safety pledges with governments worldwide and proactively engage with regulators across Europe. As we approach the upcoming legislative reforms, there are three observations I would like to leave you with:

  • First, we share your views on the importance of scaling enforcement. Rules can only appropriately protect consumers if they are properly enforced.
  • Secondly, we agree that responsibility must be taken for the products that are sold to European consumers, and that requires strengthening the ‘Authorized Representative’ role.
  • Thirdly, we believe that we need to retain Europe as a hub for innovation. This includes digitisation of consumer information through the Digital Product Passport, ensuring that the DPP is workable for e-commerce and is the single source of truth for product compliance.

This would be good for consumers who know what’s in their products, and good for authorities who know if products comply.

We welcome your questions on what we can do better and how we can work together to deliver safe, compliant, and authentic products to European consumers.