What will the mandatory labeling of shoes in Russia lead to
According to supporters of the project, mandatory labeling will defeat the counterfeit and gray shoe market, make life easier for legal market participants and, oddly enough, reduce the price of shoes by 10 percent (the demand for legal shoes will increase, and suppliers of legal shoes will be able to lower prices due to increased sales). 5-15% price increase seems more likely. The fact is that market prices depend on many factors. Reduced competition with counterfeit goods and increased costs of goods turnover drive prices to rise. At the same time, for example, a decrease in the effective demand of the population has the opposite effect on prices. We shall wait and see. They say that in a few years the requirement for mandatory labeling will apply to all types of products sold on the Russian market!
How it works
The system operator generates a unique crypto-protected Data Matrix barcode and passes it to the manufacturer, who puts it on each pair of shoes. Further, this code is scanned each time it is transferred from one company to another (even by the carrier) until the shoes get into the hands of the final consumer. After punching the check on the online cashier, the shoes are taken out of circulation, and the code is removed from the information base, in case the buyer did not return the goods to the retailer after a certain period of time.
Dates
From July 1, 2019, participants in the turnover must begin a phased transition:
From July 1 to October 1, 2019 – have to register in the system, apply for registrars of emission codes and start marking the remains according to a simplified scheme.
From October 1 to February 1, 2020 - get an emission registrar, complete the marking of remains, switch to electronic document management, connect a scanner for reading codes, set up an online cashier for working with marking, prepare some soft – a cashier program that can register sales of marked goods.
By February 1, 2020, all participants of the shoe market should master their work in a new order. From this moment on, the turnover of unlabelled products will be discontinued.
The preparatory phase (shoe labeling experiment) started on June 1, 2018 and ended on June 30, 2019.
Cost
The project operator is a commercial company. Generation of marking codes is a paid service. Starting July 1, 2019, the fee is RUR 0.50 per a code, excluding value added tax. But this, of course, is not all the costs that market participants will face.
Responsibility for non-compliance
An administrative responsibility is determined by Art. 15.12 of the Administrative Code of the Russian Federation. In case of manufacturing unlabelled products, an Individual Entrepreneur (IE) faces a fine ranging from 5 to 10 thousand rubles. A legal entity pays 10 times more. All unmarked shoes are to be confiscated.
If products subject to labeling are sold without applying special barcodes, then in accordance to part 2 of this article:
Individuals are to be fined the amount of 2,000 to 4,000 rubles;
People who have received IE status must pay from 5,000 to 10,000 rubles;
Companies are punished in the amount of 50 to 300 thousand rubles.
All illegal products are also a subject to confiscation. A similar penalty is applied for acquiring of unmarked shoe products for the purpose of their further marketing, transportation or storage.
If unlabeled products costing more than RUR 1.5 million are produced, acquired, stored, transported or sold, then a criminal liability is incurred (Art. 171.1 and 169 of the Criminal Code of Russian Federation).
