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About general retailers
General retailers are stores that sell notifiable products. This includes a limited vaping product range of flavours (tobacco, menthol and mint), but they cannot sell other flavours of vaping products. These products are not the primary products they sell, and they are commonly. dairies, petrol stations, and supermarkets.
They are different to specialist vape retailers, due to the limited range of vaping products they can sell. General retailers therefore do not need to apply for approval. Instead, they must d submit a ‘notification’, to tell the Ministry of Health that they sell these products.
These notifications are known as ‘Regulated Product Seller (RPS) notifications’ and are done in HARP. Find out how to do this on our HARP user guide page.
Notification details for general retailers
Every person that sells vapes or other notifiable products must submit a notification. In this case, the person relates to the legal entity – an individual (natural person) or a corporate (legal) entity.
For example, this means that if a company has more than one store, they still only need to submit one RPS notification. There is an assessment fee of $80 plus GST, and any card processing fees, for each notification.
All notifications must be renewed each year on an annual basis to ensure that market information is kept up to date. We may also publish a list of businesses selling regulated products on the Ministry of Health website.
Requirements for general retailers
General retailers are prohibited from discussions with customers that:
- encourage the use of vaping products
- promotes their sale
- or notifies store visitors of product availability.
General retailers can still identify products that are available for purchase, and their prices, and they can encourage smokers to switch to less harmful products.
A specialist vape retailer who is inside their approved vaping premises may:
- talk to customers about vaping products
- provide guidance on the safe use of notifiable products that are available for purchase in their approved premises (provided they comply with any requirements in regulations).
