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Join Which?Safety last: the dangerous products still sold online
Shopping sites claim that safety is their top priority. Hannah Walsh reveals why that simply isn’t true
From global tech giants such as Amazon to high street names such as B&Q, the online marketplace model, where retail platforms offer products from third-party sellers, has become the dominant form of online shopping. Research by Which? in November 2025 found that 90% of UK consumers have bought from online marketplaces in the past two years, and 24 million people are regular users. Surprisingly, 78% of UK adults were confident that these sites ensure products are safe (up from 70% in 2023).
We think this trust is undeserved. Based on a Which? survey in November 2025, we estimate that at least 8.8 million consumers have experienced harm from faulty, unsafe or fraudulent products bought from online marketplaces. We’ve proved time and time again that unsafe products are easily slipping through safety nets. Since 2019, our investigations and testing have exposed thousands of products with safety issues.
The Product Regulation and Metrology Act, adopted in July 2025, enables the government to impose product safety requirements on online marketplaces through secondary legislation, but these have been delayed. It urgently needs to use these powers to ensure that dangerous products are prevented from reaching people in the UK (see p15).
Find out how to shop safely online and avoid dangerous products.
Dangerous products still being found on marketplaces
Which? readers will be familiar with us making these points – but we make no apologies for repeating ourselves on matters of public safety, especially when those profiting repeatedly fail to deal with the problem.
Our investigations in 2025 found that not much has changed. We tested 21 balloons from seven online marketplaces and found eight that contained potentially carcinogenic chemicals (nitrosamines/nitrosatable substances) far exceeding the UK legal limit. These included balloons from Aliexpress (six times the limit) and eBay/The Range (four times the limit). A pack bought from Shein ahead of our tests caused a Which? staff member to experience numb lips and dizziness after blowing them up for her son’s birthday.
We also revealed that a third of kids’ sunglasses we bought from online marketplaces – including Amazon, Aliexpress, eBay and Temu – didn’t provide the eye protection required and were unsafe for children to wear.
And there were repeat offenders – in August, we discovered 35 baby sleeping bags presenting a serious risk of suffocation on Amazon, eBay, Etsy and Shein, among others. The first time we alerted marketplaces to these was in 2020. See p14 to find out more about five products we can’t believe are still for sale.
More than 1,000 dangerous products for sale
Frustrated by marketplace inaction, we developed our own tool to match products for sale with those flagged as dangerous by the Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS). In September, we used it to find nearly 800 being sold to UK consumers that were similar or identical to products in alerts published by the OPSS between August 2024 and August 2025.
We set a high bar for what constitutes a ‘similar’ product, but our testing and investigations have repeatedly shown that products that appear similar may pose the same safety risks, even if they have different branding. When independent labs analysed 15 of these products, all 15 were illegal to sell in the UK.
We rechecked the listings that we shared with marketplaces in October 2025 as part of the OPSS matching project and found that some platforms had taken more decisive action than others. Alibaba, Shein, Temu and The Range had removed all the listings, while 93% of the eBay listings were no longer available (this included those that had ended as well as those that had been removed). Amazon had removed 85%, but those that remained included a lamp that’s identical to an OPSS-flagged product and also failed our electrical safety testing, and a baby water mat that users reported had such a strong chemical smell it had made them cough. On Etsy, 58% of listings were still live when we checked in January – all of these are non-compliant baby sleeping bags.
Marketplaces are failing to take even the basic step of acting on official reports to protect consumers from unsafe items. We’re tired of doing their work for them.
Beware the high street retailers 'marketplace model'
An increasing number of ‘traditional’ retailers now host products from third-party sellers on their sites – think B&Q, Debenhams, Mountain Warehouse, Superdrug, Tesco and The Range. This has allowed some retailers to vastly increase the number of products they offer. By July 2025, B&Q had more than 2,000 third-party sellers on its site, and marketplace sales accounted for 45% of total online sales. Last year, Tesco upped the number of products listed on its marketplace to more than 300,000, and Superdrug hosts more than 50,000 items from third parties. Retailers are quick to highlight the greater choice available for shoppers.
Buying on a retailer site can feel reassuring, even if the product is coming from a third party. But in reality, these retailers have no sight of most products sold through their marketplaces – just like Aliexpress, Amazon, eBay, Temu and others. In our testing and investigations, we’ve found a bathroom light sold via B&Q marketplace that didn’t comply with electrical safety regulations, plug-in heaters from B&Q and The Range that matched those officially flagged by OPSS, and balloons from Debenhams and The Range containing carcinogenic chemicals that exceed the legal limit. Our advice is to avoid unbranded or unknown-brand products that could be unsafe – such as electrical items, cosmetics, toys and baby items – from third-party sellers, no matter which site is hosting them.
Which? forms coalition to tackle unsafe products
It’s not just us finding repeated safety issues with products sold on these platforms. Which? is part of a coalition of safety groups and businesses calling for tough new laws to hold platforms to account, and work from our partner organisations is adding to the growing evidence.
The London Fire Brigade (LFB) and Electrical Safety First (ESF) have both highlighted major concerns with electric bikes, e-scooters and lithium ion chargers bought online. On average, there’s a fire from a lithium battery in an e-bike or e-scooter every two days in London, according to the LFB. In 2022, ESF found 60 chargers for sale on online marketplaces that didn’t meet safety requirements and could start fires.
In addition, when European consumer organisations tested 108 USB chargers and baby toys from Shein and Temu in 2025, 96.3% didn’t meet EU safety standards. The findings included a teething glove from Temu that’s designed to be put in a baby’s mouth and contained five times the legal limit of formaldehyde and four times the amount of nonylphenol ethoxylate (an endocrine-disrupting substance).
4 common unsafe products
We ran our searching tool again in January, concentrating on a handful of product categories where we’ve seen particularly dangerous products or a persistent issue: baby sleeping bags, energy-saving plugs, plug-in heaters and reciprocating saws. Remarkably, we found 383 of these products – which the marketplaces should know full well are likely to be dangerous – for sale. When we told the marketplaces, they said they take customer safety seriously and use measures such as OPSS alert monitoring and AI to prevent unsafe listings. Most said the flagged products didn’t match official recalls, but several removed some items.
- Plug-in heaters - When we used our tool to conduct a reverse image search for plug-in heaters that have been subject to official safety reports, we found 145 listings that appeared to be similar or identical. Many of the reports state that the products pose a serious risk of fire, explosion or electric shock for the user. There were 44 matches on Aliexpress, 42 on eBay and 40 on Amazon. We’ve previously contacted these marketplaces about plug-in heaters on several occasions.
- Reciprocating saw - A reciprocating saw was flagged by the OPSS due to risk of fire and electric shock. Last year, we found dozens of what seemed to be the same saw (including those with the same model number) for sale across multiple marketplaces, and tested a sample that was found to be unsafe. A further check this year found 57 matching listings, including on Aliexpress (21), eBay (17), Amazon (13), Temu (5) and Banggood (1). Despite superficial differences, the saws shared the same characteristic design features.
- Energy saving plugs - Four OPSS recall notices for ‘energy-saving’ plugs cite a serious risk of fire and electric shock from these products. In May last year, we found that they were still widely for sale. Using the image-matching tool in January revealed a further 38 products available to UK consumers that have the same design as those in the recall notices. There were 27 on Aliexpress and seven on Amazon. We’ve been in touch with both marketplaces on multiple occasions to alert them to similar products.
- Baby sleeping bags - If a baby sleeping bag has a hood or lacks arm holes, it doesn’t meet the British Standards Institution (BSI)’s safety standards as it poses a suffocation risk, so it shouldn’t be for sale. In March 2025, the OPSS issued safety alerts for unsafe sleeping bags, then worked with marketplaces to get them removed. In August, we found 37 unsafe baby sleeping bags on online marketplaces, and in our latest matching work we found 44 that we believe don’t meet the standards.
A broken record
Every time a product fails our tests or we find a recalled product for sale online, we tell the platform in question. The most common response is that safety is its top priority or it takes safety seriously. As early as December 2019 in Which? magazine (‘The trouble with online marketplaces’, p38), we called the responses from Amazon and eBay ‘a broken record’ that ‘urgently needs changing’.
Fast forward more than six years, and we’re still hearing the same thing. Across marketplaces, we’ve heard that safety is the top priority or is taken seriously more than 60 times since 2019. A marketplace will remove the product we flagged, only for another to appear in its place.
Despite the mounting evidence from us and our partners, the only way marketplaces will truly improve their approach to safety is through properly enforced legislation.
GOVERNMENT DELAY MEANS LIVES PUT AT RISK
SUE DAVIES, WHICH? HEAD OF CONSUMER RIGHTS AND FOOD POLICY
The scale of dangerous products we find on online marketplaces is incredible – from unsafe toys to cosmetics, electric heaters and DIY tools. Legislation to address this is in sight, but it’s not being introduced with enough urgency.
We’ve posed as sellers to show how easy it is to list unsafe products on the main marketplaces, and our tool to find products subject to government safety alerts on these marketplaces has uncovered more than 1,000 items that could be putting consumers at risk. If we can identify these products, it’s within the tech giants’ capabilities to do so. But they currently don’t have the right incentive to prioritise this.
In July 2025, a new law was passed – the Product Regulation and Metrology Act – that provides the means to crack down on unsafe products sold through online marketplaces. Our work on this helped to ensure the government has powers to place a duty on online marketplaces so they’re responsible for the safety of the products listed on their sites. This would require them to do proactive checks on sellers and their products and remove products swiftly if they’re found to be unsafe. However, secondary legislation is needed for this to be effective, and to bring in strong enforcement powers so that online marketplaces are held to account. Every day the government delays, lives are being put at risk – and despite marketplaces claiming safety is a top priority, it’s clear they’re still not doing nearly enough.
This story first appeared in the March 2026 edition of Which?
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