I ordered a small batch of English craft beers online, from a shop registered in Scotland. While waiting for the order to arrive, it’s a good moment to consider where things stand with legislation on the online sale of alcohol.
For years now, the situation around the online sale of beer has been rather conflicted. At the same time as you can’t, say, order beer home from Alko or S-Market, several friends have enthusiastically told me how they get an automatic monthly beer delivery at home from an online shop offering various craft beers from Europe.
Right now the situation is that Finland lacks legislation on the distance selling of alcohol. Distance selling of alcohol refers to sales where a private individual orders alcohol from a foreign online shop and the seller is responsible for delivery. During the previous government term, the issue was debated on several occasions, but with no result. A clear ban on distance selling was already close to being pushed through, until the European Commission rejected the Sipilä government’s proposal for a distance-selling ban, since it breached rules on the free movement of goods. Now it’s the Rinne government’s turn to take up the matter, but at least the government programme makes no mention of distance selling. So operators in the industry and customers ordering are currently operating without clear legislation, and that may continue for quite a while yet.
One of the problems with distance selling (besides Alko’s monopoly) is how taxation is handled. In distance selling, since the seller arranges transport, the seller is also responsible for paying excise duty to Finland. When taxes are handled properly, European beers can’t compete on price, but the breadth of selection still tempts consumers to order. If prices in an online shop look especially cheap, there’s reason to suspect the seller isn’t properly paying taxes to Finland.
So what about a Finnish online beer shop that wants to deliver domestic purchases at home? The law states clearly that alcohol may only be sold at retail by handing the products over to the customer at an approved retail location. In Sweden the same issue has also been debated for a while, and in July the local Alko equivalent, Systembolaget, began home deliveries of alcohol nationwide. There, customers must always identify themselves, meaning access is presumably granted via, among other things, bank ID. Alko does also have an online shop, but drinks must be collected in person as the law requires, either from an Alko outlet or a pickup point attached to a grocery store.
-Janne
