What is GPSR? A plain-English overview

If you sell physical consumer goods into the European Union, the General Product Safety Regulation — Regulation (EU) 2023/988, in force since 13 December 2024 — is now the single most important horizontal compliance file you should be able to produce on demand. It replaces the 2001 General Product Safety Directive (GPSD) and modernises it for an internet-native, marketplace-driven market.

GPSR is short, blunt and broad. This guide explains what it changes, who is in scope, and what a defensible baseline looks like for an online seller in 2026.

What GPSR actually requires

GPSR sets a single mandatory standard: any product placed on the EU market must be safe, taking into account its normal and reasonably foreseeable use. That sentence is doing a lot of work. "Safe" is defined in Article 6 and covers physical hazards, but also things online sellers tend to under-weigh: cybersecurity for connected products, mental-health risks for products aimed at minors, and the foreseeable misuse of a product by users it was not designed for.

Around that core, the regulation adds four operational duties that bite hardest for online sellers:

• Traceability (Article 8 and Article 18) — every product must carry a type, batch or serial identifier and the manufacturer's contactable details. For non-EU manufacturers, an EU Responsible Person (Article 16) is mandatory.
• Online sales information (Article 19) — before the buyer can complete checkout, the listing must surface the manufacturer's identity and contact, the Responsible Person's identity and contact, the product identifier, applicable warnings, and safe-use instructions in the language of the destination market.
• Incident reporting and recall (Articles 20 and 35–36) — when a product is found unsafe, the economic operator must notify authorities via the Safety Business Gateway without delay and run a recall through the Safety Gate Portal using the prescribed remedy template.
• Cooperation duty (Article 14) — when a market-surveillance authority requests the technical file, you have a short window (typically days) to produce it. No technical file means presumption of non-conformity.

Who is in scope

GPSR uses the concept of an "economic operator" and explicitly captures online actors:

• Manufacturers — the entity placing the product on the EU market under their own name.
• Importers — for non-EU goods, the first EU-established entity that takes the product through customs.
• Distributors — anyone in the supply chain that is not the manufacturer or importer (most marketplace sellers fall here).
• Fulfilment service providers (Article 12) — captures Amazon FBA, Cdiscount Fulfilment, Zalando ZFS and similar.
• Online marketplaces (Article 22) — defined broadly: any provider intermediating distance contracts between traders and consumers. They have new due-diligence duties layered on top of the Digital Services Act.
• EU Responsible Persons — mandatory under Article 16 for non-EU manufacturers; the only route for a non-EU brand to lawfully sell consumer goods into the EU.

If you ship a single tangible product to a private consumer in the EU 27, you are in. The "occasional" exemption is narrow and does not cover commercial sellers regardless of volume.

What is new compared to the old GPSD

Three changes matter most for online sellers:

1. Online listings are now in the regulation text. Article 19 codifies what for years was only a guideline. Marketplaces have integrated these fields directly into their seller portals — Amazon EU since November 2024, Etsy from January 2025, eBay from Q1 2025.
2. Non-EU sellers cannot self-represent. Under the old GPSD, a non-EU seller could often sell into the EU through a marketplace with no EU-established representative. Article 16 closes that. Without a contactable EU Responsible Person on file, listings are suppressed under Article 22(7).
3. Recall must use the prescribed template (Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/1435). Member States no longer accept free-form recall notices, and the consumer must be offered at least two of: repair, replacement, or refund.

The minimum viable baseline

For a single-brand online seller, a defensible GPSR baseline has six elements you can stand up in a working week:

1. A technical file per SKU. Materials, sub-suppliers, applicable harmonised standards, risk assessment, test reports, instructions and warnings, declaration of conformity (where another EU regulation requires one).
2. An identified Responsible Person for the EU 27 with a postal address and a monitored electronic address — both must accept service of process in at least one EU official language.
3. Listing-side compliance fields populated on every channel: manufacturer name and contact, Responsible Person contact, product identifier, warnings, safe-use instructions in the destination market's language.
4. A documented incident-handling SOP that points to the Safety Business Gateway URL, names a responsible internal owner, and defines decision windows (24h to assess, 48h to notify).
5. A retention policy of 10 years for the technical file after the product is last placed on the market (Article 9(7)).
6. A monitoring channel — typically the brand's customer-service inbox plus marketplace return-reason data — so post-market signals reach the responsible owner.

Most online sellers already do five of these informally. GPSR asks you to make them explicit and auditable.

How Regonance helps

Regonance scans your existing product files — spec sheets, certificates, listing text, supplier documents — and rebuilds a structured GPSR readiness view: per-SKU technical-file gaps, RP coverage, listing-field completeness, and an incident-response checklist. The same data feeds the DPP and EPR modules without re-keying. Run a free scan on a single SKU to see what your current GPSR readiness looks like.

What to do this week

• Confirm which of your products are in GPSR scope (almost all consumer goods are).
• Appoint an EU Responsible Person if you do not have one, and add their details to every EU-bound listing.
• Audit your top 20 EU-selling SKUs for the Article 19 information set.
• Write the one-page incident SOP and circulate it to whoever monitors your customer-service inbox.

Glossary

Article 19. The provision of GPSR that lists the mandatory information online sellers must display before checkout for EU consumers.

EU Responsible Person. An EU-established natural or legal person designated by a non-EU manufacturer to handle GPSR compliance duties, including technical-file production and authority cooperation.

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

Safety Gate Portal. The EU's rapid alert system for non-food dangerous products; the consumer-facing companion to the Safety Business Gateway.

Implementing Regulation (EU) 2024/1435. The template-and-procedure rule that prescribes how recalls and safety warnings must be communicated to consumers under GPSR.

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Educational information, not legal advice. Validate scope and obligations with a qualified advisor before acting; consult the consolidated text of Regulation (EU) 2023/988 on EUR-Lex for the authoritative legal source.