Country's largest vape retailer under investigation over advertising concerns

The country's largest vape retailer is under investigation by the Ministry of Health over concerns it's operating in advertising grey area.

Regulations that came into place in June 2025 banned retailers from advertising vaping products, which included showing pictures of product on their websites, or social media.

However, one week earlier, Shosha sent out an email to its mailing list informing customers that it's local .co.nz domain would no longer feature product images due to incoming regulations.

Instead, subscribers were directed to a newly created .com "global" website, listed at a US address, where product displays remained fully visible and available for direct order.

At the time, Associate Health Minister Casey Costello referred Shosha's "global" website to the Ministry of Health to investigate.

MoH said the investigation indicated that the shosha.com website was hosted and registered in the USA and did not deliver regulated products to New Zealand.

But with the website still active, a group of researchers said it is clear that the website is being used to bypass the regulation, and is marketed at a local audience, according to their research.

Researcher at Auckland University's school of population, Lucy Hardie, said when they took a deeper dive into the website, there were many things that indicated it was simply a workaround rather than a completely new marketing venture for a global market.

"One of the first things was, there was a product availability tool, so you can check in store whether your favourite product is available in your nearest store, but none of the stores listed are outside of New Zealand."

Hardie said a number of test purchases were made on the .com website, which arrived at local addresses within three days. Despite being ordered on the global site, postage documentation showed the orders were dispatched directly from Auckland.

"Effectively this website can be used in exactly the same way [as the .co.nz website] but has full view of all the products."

Hardie also assessed the Instagram account associated with the global website. Under the new legislation it is an offence for retailers to display vaping products on social media.

The Instagram page, shosha.global, is linked to and accessible via the .com website.

Location information accessible via the 'about this account' section of the account's bio showed it was based in New Zealand.

Hardie and the other researchers analysed 67 posts on the account, posted between 17 June 2025, when the regulation came into effect, and May 2026.

She said the posts displayed pictures of vaping products in breach with the regulation, and many of them seemed to be targeted at a New Zealand audience.

Forty-six-point-three percent of the posts featured bilingual Te Reo Māori warning labels, 5.9 percent posts included references to Matariki, and 40.3 percent of posts regularly displayed New Zealand-specific nicotine concentration restrictions.

"All of those things sort of put together indicate that these tools are being used as a workaround for this company to continue promoting their products in full view, but sit outside of the law." Hardie said.

When Checkpoint last attempted to access the Instagram account on 6 November, two days after Hardie's research was released, the account had been taken down.

A Ministry of Health spokesperson said they reviewing whether their position on the shosha.com website has changed.

Despite the previous investigation, they said the Ministry had no knowledge of the shosha.global Instagram account.

In terms of issuing infringement notices the Ministry said its focus for websites has been on advertising, by companies registered in New Zealand.

Seventy-one infringement notices for advertising breaches on websites were issued between June 2025 and July 2026.

"New Zealand law applies to a website that is accessible in New Zealand. However, where a company is registered overseas, there are practical and jurisdictional challenges when investigating and taking enforcement action."

Hardie said Shosha's website showed that the regulation was too loose.

"One of the first things that we should be looking at is strengthening our laws and making sure we're not always playing catch up to whatever the companies are doing at the time. We've seen them adapt to every regulation and law that we put up and then we have to keep changing it.

"We knew that [the Ministry of Health] were already aware of this situation well over a year ago and nothing has happened. So it just seems to me that if one of our most prominent vape companies can operate then what's stopping every other company from operating in this way. It makes our legislation completely meaningless if there's no enforcement, if our health authorities know about it but nothing is ever done."

Hardie said having product images available meant retailers could continue to target their advertising at young people.

"We've got really high rates of youth vaping in NZ and part of the product appeal is that they are marketed really slickly in a range of flavours and colours and designs that we know appeal to young people. So the intent of the law was to prevent those kinds of appeals from being used in NZ."

Shosha did not respond to RNZ's request for comment.