The Maze: Amazon, Etsy and TikTok Shop were among marketplaces that removed flagged baby-product listings after Which? found 150 potentially dangerous items across eight sites. That is a useful immediate response. It is also the least ambitious version of marketplace safety.
The investigation puts the awkward question back where it belongs: on the operating system that lets third parties reach consumers. A marketplace may not own a product, but it does own the catalog rules, seller onboarding, search placement, payments and the switch that removes a listing.
The economic split is the problem. Third-party sellers supply the stock while platforms broker the transaction. The UK’s Office for Product Safety and Standards describes marketplaces as platforms where sellers offer goods directly to consumers and the platform facilitates the sale.
Delisting is not the same as stopping recurrence. The UK Product Safety Review has already warned that unsafe or non-compliant goods can be removed and then relisted.
This is where compliance costs move. Stronger marketplace duties would push more cost into seller verification, product-data checks, restricted-category controls, monitoring and enforcement teams.
The policy direction is still not settled. The Which? findings do not prove every listing on these platforms was unsafe, nor do they announce a new UK legal duty. But they strengthen the case for a clearer answer to a familiar question: when a marketplace controls access to millions of consumers, how much responsibility can it outsource along with the inventory?
Why it matters: Marketplace growth turns product safety into a platform-power issue. The service collecting the commission may not manufacture the goods, but it sets the rules that determine whether those goods can be found, bought and quietly relisted.
