How to spot a product that was never meant for the UK

Arbi guide · Last updated 24 August 2026 · about 4 minutes to read

A “grey import” is a genuine product brought into the UK outside the manufacturer's official channel. It is not counterfeit and it is not illegal to sell. It is also frequently not covered by the warranty you think you are getting.

Five signs

  1. The price is well below everyone else. Not 5% below — 20–30% below every other shop, on current stock. That gap has to come from somewhere.
  2. The listing mentions a region. “EU version”, “US model”, “international edition”, “imported”. Sellers often say so — in small print, but they say so.
  3. The plug. “EU plug with adapter included” is a clear signal. An adapter is not the same as a UK-specification appliance.
  4. The warranty is from the seller, not the manufacturer. “12-month seller warranty” means the maker will not service it. If the seller disappears, so does your cover.
  5. The model code ends differently. Manufacturers use regional suffixes. A code ending in a suffix you do not see at any UK retailer usually means the unit was built for another market.
What it costs you: manufacturer warranty is usually void, official repair may be refused, software and features can differ, and returns are harder if the seller is overseas. The saving is real. So is the risk transfer.

When it is fine

For a cheap accessory with no meaningful warranty, a grey import is often a perfectly sensible buy. The risk scales with the price and the likelihood of needing a repair. On a £15 cable it barely matters. On a £900 television it matters enormously.

Marketplaces are where this lives

On a marketplace you are usually buying from a third-party seller, not the marketplace itself. Check who the seller actually is, where they are based, and who provides the warranty — all three are on the listing, and all three are easy to skim past.

How to check before you buy, in under a minute

  1. Copy the exact model code from the listing and search it. If every UK retailer shows a slightly different code, the listing is probably an import.
  2. Search the brand's own UK site for that code. Manufacturers list the models they support here, and an absence is meaningful.
  3. Read the warranty line on the listing. “Manufacturer warranty” and “seller warranty” are different promises with different values.
  4. Check where the seller is based. It is on the listing, usually under business information, and it determines how hard a return will be.

Why the price gap exists at all

Manufacturers set different wholesale prices in different countries, for tax, currency and market reasons. An importer buying where the product is cheap and selling where it is dear captures that gap. Nothing about that is dishonest — but the official distributor's price includes UK support, UK warranty servicing and UK returns handling, and the import price does not. You are not paying less for the same thing; you are paying less for less.

What Arbi does about it

Arbi actively rejects results that carry foreign-market wording — “EU version”, “US spec”, “grey import”, “not UK stock” and similar — unless you asked for that yourself. It also compares regional suffixes in model codes and drops results whose region disagrees with the product you are looking at. It is not perfect, and a seller who says nothing cannot be caught this way, which is why the five checks above are still worth a minute of your time.