Vietnam’s General Department of Customs has issued a dispatch directing customs officers to halt processing of e-commerce purchases from companies that are not registered with the Ministry of Industry and Trade.
Saigon News is saying that packages that don’t have details of the e-commerce platform from which they originated will be prohibited entry–it’s not clear how customs will distinguish between packages from family or friends and unregistered e-commerce platforms and platforms that are not required to be registered.
On that note, VN Express, carrying the same story notes that companies that need to register are only those with Vietnamese domain names, that are in Vietnamese, or that conduct more than 100,000 transactions a year in Vietnam.
With this in mind, this latest dispatch may be very challenging to implement.
That said, there has been pressure on the authorities to protect domestic businesses from cheap imports from abroad in the wake of Temu’s high-profile market entry. In this context, this move looks to be more design to allay some of those concerns rather than necessarily crackdown on unregistered e-commerce platforms.