Automated Online Product Search Tool (WebCrawler Procurement)

The Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS), part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), was created in January 2018 to deliver consumer protection and to support business confidence, productivity, and growth. We regulate a wide range of products with a focus on their safety and integrity. We work with local, national, and international regulators, with consumer representatives and with businesses to deliver effective protections and to support compliance.

Our mission is to be a trusted product regulator for the UK. This means protecting people and places, enabling business to thrive and empowering consumers to make good choices. We will be a leader of good regulatory practice and a champion of local regulation.

OPSS is:

• the national regulator for all consumer products, except for vehicles, medicines, and food.
• the national regulator for legal metrology, ensuring weighing and measuring instruments are accurate and reliable.

Suppliers are strongly encouraged to read the text at the following link to gain a full understanding of the role of the enforcement services with Government:

www.gov.uk/guidance/national-re… ↗

A growing area of work is enforcing product safety and standards for products being sold via online marketplaces. Our Online Regulation Team (EPE) is responsible for regulating this space, in particular identifying and removing unsafe products from the market.

The Online Regulations Team (EPE) currently undertake manual web searches for known non-compliant/unsafe products. The searches are made by individual team members checking for the presence of unsafe products being sold by online retailors or seller websites using keywords and image searches. When unsafe products are found, a team member would contact the retailor or Primary Authority and ask them to remove the product from sale on safety grounds. Results are currently saved on an Excel spreadsheet saved on OPSS SharePoint.

The current process is labour intensive and utilises limited resources. No sooner are non-compliant/unsafe products removed from websites they are often re-listed under different descriptions and revised images on alternative sites.

An automated online tool is required to search the web for potentially unsafe products at a much faster rate than is possible through manual process. A web crawler/scraper style tool will combine image and key word recognition, with the ability to automate searches. Distinguish between webpages offering products for sale and not just mention that product. Products for sale in the UK with UK shipping but not webpages offering something for sale but not available for purchase in the UK. To be able to capture screenshots to an evidential standard when a listing is identified as part of a search. This is then saved ready to be reviewed and used by an officer later.

BEIS is hosting a pre-market supplier event for this project which will take place on Wednesday 7th September 2022 at 14:00 - 16:0 via MS Teams. If you would like to attend this event, please contact David Boston on the details provided within this advertisement.

If this event provides sufficient information BEIS will proceed to market with a procurement at the end of September 2022

This supplier engagement event provides an opportunity for suppliers to ask questions and highlight any potential issues.