As long as you don't connect to mains power and you don't ship a finished product, you're exempt from CE certification. So use an USB plug as your power supply and sell it as DIY kit to be assembled by the customer and you're good to go.
I agree about the ambiguity of CE marking. It's pretty impenetrable as a non-expert. I wonder if he's referring to Fabius the Delayer.
> It even made me suspect that it is easier for a non-EU country to sell to customers in the EU than it is for an EU company to do the same. An advantage that Chinese businesses surely enjoy.
100% correct. There's way too many small parcels for customs to check them; the major nuisance is the recipient having to pay the tax themselves.
> If one were to incorporate in Estonia but not sell to anyone in Estonia, or any member of the European Union for that matter, that company would theoretically be exempt from a whole cluster of legal and tax headaches.
.. but why would you do that? This guy appears to be a US national, he should just register in Delaware like everyone else. The Estonian company and "E-Estonia" system is primarily useful if you do want to do business in the EU and have a presence there.
If you're not in the EU and want a flag of convenience company registration, the usual places like Grand Cayman offer their services.
What an odd person. I can't figure the Estonia thing out either. I think the idea is to provide plausible deniability that the company is operating in the EU??? By incorporating in the EU but doing nothing else there? I can't imagine what specific legal and tax headaches one would escape that way.
The CE marking is super simple in principle, right? Just self-certify that you meet all applicable European regulations, and that's when the fun starts. It would be impenetrable to do from scratch but as "negative zero" points out, you can bootstrap from looking at competing products' declarations of conformity.
https://www.pollin.de/p/bausatz-led-wechselblinker-810051
German company selling a German-made electronics kits in Germany without CE certification. And they have lots of them:
https://www.pollin.de/bauelemente/bausaetze-module/bausaetze...
As long as you don't connect to mains power and you don't ship a finished product, you're exempt from CE certification. So use an USB plug as your power supply and sell it as DIY kit to be assembled by the customer and you're good to go.