I sell on a marketplace to the EU — what compliance do I need?

The regulation does not change by marketplace. The enforcement intensity does — dramatically. That single sentence explains almost every confused thread about EU compliance in seller forums, and it is worth understanding before you decide how urgent your situation is.

Your legal obligations come from GPSR, PPWR, the Battery Regulation, EmpCo, CE legislation, REACH and EPR law. They apply identically whether you sell through Amazon, your own Shopify store, Etsy or a wholesaler. What differs is who checks, how, and how quickly your revenue stops when you fail the check.

Amazon EU: mechanical, immediate, catalogue-wide

Amazon is the strictest enforcement environment in Europe, because it has built compliance into listing validation.

GPSR responsible person. Required in listing attributes: the name, address and contact details of an EU-established responsible person under Regulation (EU) 2023/988 Article 16, plus manufacturer details and safety information. Missing data blocks the offer.

EPR registration numbers. Amazon collects and validates registration numbers for packaging, and for electrical equipment and batteries where applicable, against national registers in Germany, France, Spain, Austria and others. Validation is against the register, so a plausible-looking number does not pass.

Battery registration. Enforced separately from packaging. A device with a built-in cell needs battery producer registration in the relevant markets, and Amazon asks for the number.

Packaging compliance. Verification is increasing as PPWR duties phase in. Expect requests for composition and labelling data to become routine.

Two things make Amazon enforcement painful out of proportion to the underlying fix. It is often catalogue-wide rather than per-offer, so one missing appointment can suspend everything you sell in a market. And reinstatement takes days of appeal handling even after you have the missing document, so the revenue loss is not recovered by fixing it quickly. We covered the recovery path in Amazon suspended my listing for GPSR.

Shopify and your own store: no gate, same law

Shopify does not check your compliance. There is no listing validation, no attribute requirement, no registration field. Sellers read that as safety. It is the opposite.

On a marketplace, non-compliance surfaces as a blocked listing. On your own store, it surfaces as a customs hold on an inbound shipment, a market surveillance authority information request, a consumer complaint escalated to a national authority, or a Safety Gate notification. Those outcomes are slower to arrive and considerably worse when they do, because by then you have been selling non-compliant product at volume for months.

Practical implications for a direct-to-consumer store: you still need the EU responsible person, still need EPR registration in every country you ship to, still need battery registration, still need conformity documentation, and you must still present mandatory information — safety information, manufacturer and responsible-person identity, and warnings — to the consumer before purchase. On your own site nobody builds those fields for you, so build them into your product template.

Etsy: rising, and specific about responsible-person data

Etsy collects GPSR responsible-person and manufacturer information and surfaces it on listings. Enforcement of EPR registration is increasing market by market, and Etsy has been progressively adding registration fields for France and Germany.

The Etsy population is where the small-business misconception concentrates — handmade sellers who assume a craft exemption exists. It does not. A hand-poured candle is a consumer product with packaging and, if you call it "eco-friendly", an environmental claim in scope of EmpCo.

eBay, Bol.com, Zalando, Kaufland and the rest

Enforcement is growing everywhere, on the same pattern: responsible-person data first, then EPR numbers, then category-specific requirements.

eBay collects EPR numbers for France and Germany and GPSR contact data. Bol.com enforces Dutch and Belgian producer registration and is strict on product safety documentation. Zalando is demanding on textile and chemical documentation and on sustainability claim substantiation, which puts EmpCo squarely in scope for fashion sellers. Kaufland follows the German register requirements closely.

Anywhere a Member State makes marketplaces liable for listing unregistered producers, the marketplace will validate registration. That liability now exists in enough countries that validation is the norm rather than the exception.

The rule, and what follows from it

The regulation does not change by marketplace; the enforcement intensity does. Three consequences worth internalising.

First, compliance built for Amazon satisfies everywhere else. If you are multi-channel, build to the strictest gate and reuse the artefacts. The responsible-person appointment, the EPR registrations, the documentation and the packaging data are the same for every channel.

Second, an unchecked channel is a deferred risk, not a smaller one. Sellers who moved volume to their own store to escape Amazon's requirements did not reduce their obligations; they removed the mechanism that was telling them about them.

Third, the marketplace's request is not the requirement. Amazon asks for what Amazon validates. It does not ask about your CE technical file, your REACH restrictions, your PPWR recycled-content data or your EmpCo claim substantiation — and an authority absolutely will. Passing the listing check is a floor, not compliance.

Where to start if you sell on several channels

Do it once, in this order: work out which mandates apply to each product; appoint the representation you need; register in each country and stream where you place product; assemble the documentation; then feed the resulting numbers and data into each channel's fields.

Regonance holds that once per product, across 431 obligations and nine regulations, and produces the documentation and the numbers each channel asks for. The alternative — answering each marketplace's questionnaire separately as it arrives — is how sellers end up with four inconsistent versions of their own compliance position.

For the marketplace-specific walkthroughs, see GPSR for Shopify, Amazon and Etsy sellers. For what is enforceable right now, see the urgent deadlines for e-commerce sellers.

What each channel actually asks you for

A practical field list, because the abstract version is less useful than the concrete one.

Amazon. Manufacturer name and address. EU responsible person name, address, email and phone. Product safety attributes, warnings and age grading where applicable. Packaging EPR registration number per country. WEEE registration number for electricals. Battery registration number where a cell is present. CE mark evidence and, for gated categories such as toys, the declaration of conformity and test reports on request.

Etsy. Manufacturer and responsible-person details surfaced on the listing, plus safety information and warnings. EPR registration fields for France and Germany, expanding.

eBay. EPR numbers for France and Germany, GPSR contact data, and safety information fields.

Bol.com. Dutch and Belgian producer registration, strict product-safety documentation requests, and category-specific attributes.

Zalando. Textile and chemical documentation, restricted-substance compliance, and substantiation for sustainability claims — which puts EmpCo directly in play for fashion brands.

Your own store. Nothing is requested, and everything is still required. Build fields into your product template for responsible-person details, manufacturer identity, warnings, safety information and language versions, because no one will prompt you.

Recovering from a suspension, briefly

If the offer is already down, the sequence that works is: identify the exact missing artefact from the notice rather than guessing; obtain it properly, because a plausible-looking number fails register validation; submit through the compliance workflow rather than general seller support; and fix the same gap across every marketplace at once, since the same missing appointment will suspend you elsewhere within weeks.

What does not work is appealing without the artefact, or supplying a supplier's certificate in place of a declaration of conformity. The full walkthrough is in Amazon suspended my listing for GPSR.

Build once, publish everywhere

The strategic point is worth repeating because it saves real money. Compliance artefacts are channel-agnostic. One responsible-person appointment, one set of registrations per country and stream, one risk assessment, one technical file, one packaging dataset, one substantiated claim set — then each channel's fields are populated from the same source.

Sellers who instead treat each marketplace's questionnaire as a separate project end up with four inconsistent versions of their own compliance position, and no way to answer a simple question like "which of my products lack a declaration of conformity?".

Regonance holds that single position per product across 431 obligations and nine regulations, and produces the documents and numbers each channel asks for. Which mandates apply to your particular products takes about thirty seconds to establish, and it is worth doing before you start filling in anyone's form.

One more thing worth checking per channel

Each marketplace stores compliance data in a different place, and a field that is populated in one account can be blank in another for the same product. If you sell the same SKU through several channels, audit the data per channel rather than per product — sellers routinely find the responsible-person details present on Amazon Germany and missing on Amazon Spain for an identical listing, because the attributes were entered market by market.

The same applies after a change. Appointing a new responsible person, moving EPR scheme, or re-registering under a new legal entity means updating every channel, and the channel you forget is the one that suspends you. Keep a single record of the current values and treat each channel as a publishing target for it, not as a source of truth.