Two years after the General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) began applying on 13 December 2024, the most active enforcer is not a market surveillance authority — it is the marketplace listing form. If your listings on Amazon's EU stores and the other European marketplaces name an EU responsible person, show the manufacturer's contact details and carry safety information in the buyer's language, you trade; if they do not, the listing is gated or suppressed, usually without a human involved. This guide covers what the regulation actually requires, how marketplaces enforce it day to day, what official enforcement looks like, and a checklist to run against your own catalogue this week.
What does the GPSR actually require?
The GPSR — Regulation (EU) 2023/988 — replaced the 2001 General Product Safety Directive and covers essentially every consumer product sold in the EU that is not fully governed by more specific safety legislation. Two of its ideas changed e-commerce operations. First, no product may be sold to EU consumers unless an economic operator established in the EU is responsible for its safety. Second, the regulation explicitly covers distance selling: an online listing targeted at EU consumers counts as making the product available, so information that used to live only on the physical product must now appear in the listing itself.
What must an online listing show under the GPSR?
For any offer aimed at EU consumers, the listing must carry:
- Manufacturer identity: the manufacturer's name or registered trade name, plus contact details including a postal and an electronic address.
- The EU responsible person: where the manufacturer is established outside the EU, the name and contact details of the economic operator inside the EU who is responsible for the product.
- Product identification: information that allows the product to be identified — including an image of it and the product type.
- Warnings and safety information: in a language consumers in the target market can understand. A listing on a Swedish store needs Swedish safety information, not an English PDF three clicks away.
For the fine print of your category, read the distance-selling provisions of Regulation (EU) 2023/988 directly on EUR-Lex rather than trusting any summary, including this one.
Who counts as the responsible person?
Four roles can hold it: a manufacturer established in the EU, an importer, an authorised representative appointed in writing, or an EU-established fulfilment service provider handling the products. For a Nordic brand expanding into Germany or France, this is usually already solved — you are an EU-established manufacturer, or the importer of record for goods you produce in Asia. Your remaining work is making sure every listing in every store says so, because marketplaces check the fields, not your org chart.
For a brand outside the EU entering the Nordics, someone must take the role before the first unit sells. A distributor who buys your stock becomes the importer and carries it naturally. If you sell on your own account, you will need an authorised representative — there is now a paid service industry for exactly this — or a fulfilment partner willing to hold the role, which many are not.
How do marketplaces enforce the GPSR?
The regulation gave online marketplaces their own obligations: registration in the EU's Safety Gate portal, a single contact point for authorities, and a duty to act on takedown orders within deadlines counted in working days, not weeks. That architecture made marketplaces structurally risk-averse: it is cheaper to gate a listing than to argue about it, and two years of operation have hardened that instinct into machinery:
- Gating at creation. Amazon's EU stores and most European marketplaces now require the GPSR fields — manufacturer contact, responsible person, safety documentation where the category demands it — before a listing goes live. Missing fields mean the listing never publishes.
- Retroactive sweeps. Existing listings get deactivated in batches when compliance fields are found empty. Sellers typically discover this through a dashboard notification after the listing is already down.
- Category escalation. Toys, childcare articles, electrical goods and anything with a plug or a battery attract document requests, not just field checks.
- Language checks. Warnings and safety information are increasingly expected in the listing content or imagery, in the local language of each store.
The method for staying ahead is unglamorous: every marketplace publishes its GPSR requirements in its seller documentation, and most show per-listing compliance status in the dashboard. Check it store by store rather than assuming a compliant Swedish listing means a compliant German one. And with gifts opened on Christmas Eve across the Nordics, a listing that goes dark in the second week of December is not an inconvenience — it is the season.
What does official enforcement look like in practice?
Slower, rarer, and heavier. Market surveillance sits with national authorities — Konsumentverket in Sweden, Sikkerhedsstyrelsen in Denmark, Tukes in Finland, and the federal states' authorities in Germany. They run category-based sweeps and test purchases, and they feed Safety Gate, the EU's public rapid-alert system for dangerous products. Safety Gate publishes its alerts weekly; reading your own category's entries is the cheapest market-surveillance intelligence available — it tells you which product types and failure modes authorities are currently pulling off the market.
We will not pretend to know inspection volumes — nobody outside the authorities does, and any article quoting precise enforcement percentages is guessing. The honest risk model after two years looks like this: marketplace suppression is near-certain if your fields are wrong, while authority action is unlikely on any given day but carries recalls, sales bans and seller-account consequences when it lands.
The GPSR compliance checklist
- Map every SKU to its responsible economic operator — manufacturer, importer, authorised representative or fulfilment provider — and confirm that operator knows and accepts the role in writing.
- Get the details onto the product. Manufacturer and responsible-person name and contact details belong on the product, its packaging or an accompanying document — not only in the listing.
- Populate the marketplace fields in every store you sell in, and verify status in each dashboard rather than assuming it propagated.
- Translate warnings and safety information into the language of every market you list in.
- Keep the technical file reachable. Traceability means you can connect a batch on a shelf to its documentation within days, not months.
- Read Safety Gate weekly for your category, and re-audit your listings quarterly the way a surveillance officer would — starting from the live listing, not from your spreadsheet.
How we help. When JTI Ventures takes a brand into the Nordics as buying distributor, we are the importer — the EU responsible-operator role sits with us, and our team maintains the GPSR fields across the 30+ marketplaces we operate on. On consignment and fulfilment models, we map each SKU to the right responsible person, fix listing gaps store by store, and keep warnings localized into the Nordic languages. For Nordic brands heading into Germany and France, we run the same audit in the other direction before the first pallet ships.
Frequently asked questions
Can my 3PL or freight forwarder be the GPSR responsible person?
A fulfilment service provider established in the EU can hold the role, but only if it actually agrees to — and many decline, because the role carries real safety obligations. A freight forwarder that never takes custody of your goods in a warehouse does not qualify. Confirm in writing who holds the role before you list.
Does the GPSR apply in Norway?
No — the GPSR is EU law, so it applies in Sweden, Denmark and Finland but not automatically in Norway, which is outside the EU and runs its own product-safety regime. Verify current requirements with the Norwegian authorities before shipping. If you also sell into any EU member state, you need full GPSR compliance regardless.
My products were on the market before December 2024 — am I exempt?
Stock lawfully placed on the EU market before the GPSR's application date benefited from a transition allowance, but that covers the specific units placed then, not your product line. Anything placed on the market since must comply in full, and marketplaces do not distinguish old stock in their listing checks. Two years on, treat everything as in scope.