Seller responsibilities under GPSR: a practical checklist

GPSR assigns different duties to different roles. Get the role wrong and you either over-engineer compliance you do not owe, or you miss obligations that will land you on the Safety Gate portal. This guide maps the role-specific obligations under Regulation (EU) 2023/988 and explains what "documented" looks like in practice for each.

First: identify your role correctly

GPSR Article 3 defines four kinds of "economic operator". Your role is not what you call yourself — it is what the regulation deems you to be based on what you do.

• Manufacturer (Art. 3(8)): the entity placing the product on the market under its own name or trade mark, regardless of whether it physically made the product. A brand sourcing OEM goods from a Chinese factory and putting its logo on the box is the manufacturer.
• Importer (Art. 3(9)): the first EU-established entity that releases a non-EU-made product into free circulation in the EU.
• Distributor (Art. 3(10)): any economic operator in the supply chain that is not the manufacturer or the importer. Most marketplace resellers fall here.
• Fulfilment service provider (Art. 3(11)): handles warehousing, packaging and dispatch on behalf of a third party. Amazon FBA, Cdiscount Fulfilment, ZFS, 3PLs.

Two roles can apply at once. A brand that designs in the EU, ships from an EU warehouse and sells direct-to-consumer is both manufacturer and importer. The duties stack rather than cancel.

Manufacturer duties (Article 9)

The manufacturer carries the heaviest load:

1. Produce a technical file before placing the product on the market. Article 9(2). The file must contain a general description of the product, a risk assessment, applicable standards or specifications, test reports, instructions and warnings, and any required declaration of conformity. Retain for 10 years (Art. 9(7)).
2. Mark the product with a type, batch or serial number and your name, registered trade name or trade mark and a single postal contact (Art. 9(5)–(6)).
3. Provide warnings and safe-use instructions in a language easily understood by consumers in the country of sale (Art. 9(7)). In practice this means localising for every EU destination market.
4. Take corrective action when you discover a product is unsafe (Art. 9(8)–(13)), including notifying the Safety Business Gateway without delay.
5. Cooperate with market-surveillance authorities including providing the technical file in an EU official language they understand (Art. 9(11)).

Importer duties (Article 11)

The importer is the EU's accountability anchor for non-EU goods:

1. Verify the manufacturer has carried out the risk assessment and that the technical documentation exists before importing.
2. Mark the product with your importer name and postal contact in addition to the manufacturer's (Art. 11(3)).
3. Hold a copy of the technical file or have demonstrable access to it for the same 10-year retention period (Art. 11(7)).
4. Step into the manufacturer's role under Art. 11(2) if you modify the product, place it on the market under your own name, or if the manufacturer is outside the EU and refuses to designate a Responsible Person.

Distributor duties (Article 12)

Distributors verify rather than create — but verification is not trivial:

1. Confirm the product carries the required identifiers and warnings before listing or shipping it (Art. 12(2)).
2. Confirm an importer or Responsible Person is identified on the packaging or in the accompanying documents.
3. Refrain from supplying a product you know or should reasonably know does not conform (Art. 12(2)). "Should reasonably know" includes obvious gaps a competent distributor would spot.
4. Cooperate with authority requests and pass on safety information through the supply chain (Art. 12(5)).

Marketplace sellers who relabel, repackage or substantially modify products are deemed manufacturers (Art. 13) — and inherit the heavier manufacturer duties.

Fulfilment service provider duties (Article 12)

Article 12 also applies in part to fulfilment providers:

1. Verify that the products they store carry the required information before shipping to consumers.
2. Cooperate with authorities including providing storage records, shipment data and seller details on request.
3. Block dispatch when notified of an unsafe product by an authority or the seller.

In practice, Amazon, Cdiscount and ZFS now require sellers to upload GPSR compliance evidence before they will accept inventory.

What "documented" actually means

A market-surveillance officer will not accept "we have it in our PIM" as evidence. The 2025 enforcement reports from BAuA (Germany) and DGCCRF (France) consistently flag the same gaps:

• Technical file present but undated — the officer cannot tell whether the analysis predates the product's placement on the market.
• Risk assessment that is generic supplier boilerplate rather than specific to the SKU.
• No named owner for incident response — the inbox the SOP points at is a shared mailbox no one monitors at weekends.
• EU Responsible Person details on the website but not in the marketplace listing — Art. 19 applies per channel.

A defensible documentary baseline is:

• A signed, dated technical file per SKU with at least: risk assessment, instructions, warnings, applicable standards, test reports.
• A signed RP appointment letter for each non-EU brand, including the RP's monitored electronic address.
• A one-page incident SOP with named owner, decision windows, and the Safety Business Gateway URL.
• A retention log showing where the file is stored and the expiry date of the 10-year retention clock.

How Regonance helps

Regonance ingests your existing supplier files, certificates and listing text and rebuilds them into the structured technical file GPSR expects, scoring per-SKU readiness against each of the duties above. The output is a downloadable readiness pack you can show an auditor without preparation. Try it on a single SKU.

Glossary

Economic operator. GPSR's umbrella term for manufacturers, importers, distributors, fulfilment providers and authorised representatives.

Risk assessment. A documented analysis of foreseeable hazards from a product's normal and misuse, mapped to mitigations and residual risk.

Authorised Representative / EU Responsible Person. An EU-established person designated by a non-EU manufacturer to carry out specific GPSR duties on its behalf (Art. 16).

Safety Business Gateway. The EU portal where economic operators notify authorities of unsafe products and corrective actions.

---

Educational information, not legal advice. Always validate role attribution and documentation requirements with a qualified advisor before going to market.