GPSR for online sellers: the product data you must show

The General Product Safety Regulation (EU) 2023/988 replaced the old General Product Safety Directive and has applied in every Member State since 13 December 2024 (Article 52). As a regulation it applies directly, without a national law in between. It covers consumer products sold offline and online, new, used, repaired or refurbished.

Some groups are outside its scope, such as medicinal products, food, feed, living plants and animals, and antiques (Article 2). Products that already have sector rules, such as toys or electrical equipment with a CE marking, still fall under the GPSR for the risks and duties those rules do not cover. The Commission explains how the two fit together in its GPSR guidelines.

For a merchant the regulation has two sides: duties for the product itself (labels, instructions, a responsible person, accident reporting through the Safety Business Gateway under Article 20) and duties for the listing. The listing duties are the ones that turn into product data fields.

Article 19 applies to every economic operator that offers products online or through other distance sales. The offer has to show the information below clearly and visibly. Each row is one or more fields in your product data.

Under Article 16 of the GPSR, a product may only be placed on the EU market if an economic operator established in the EU is responsible for it. That operator is defined in Article 4 of Regulation (EU) 2019/1020: a manufacturer established in the EU, an importer, an authorised representative with a written mandate, or a fulfilment service provider when none of the others is in the EU.

The responsible person checks that the product matches its technical documentation and its labelling, and answers to market surveillance authorities. For your data, it is one more contact record per product: a name and two addresses, often the same for a whole brand. That is why it belongs in a shared list rather than typed again on every product.

Article 9 adds what the manufacturer puts on the product itself, and the listing often repeats it. The product needs a type, batch or serial number (Article 9(5)), the manufacturer's name and postal and electronic address (Article 9(6)), and clear instructions and safety information in a language consumers easily understand, set by the Member State where it is sold (Article 9(7)). Importers add their own name and address under Article 11.

Keep these values in the same record as the listing fields. When the address on the box and the address on the product page come from one field, they cannot drift apart.

Article 22 makes online marketplaces design their interface so traders can enter the Article 19 information for each product and show it on the listing. Each marketplace built its own form, so the same data has to reach each one in its own shape. What the public seller pages said on 11 October 2026:

Run through this list per product, or better, per product type, so every new product starts with the right empty fields.

Treat GPSR data like any other product attribute. Create a group, for example Product safety, with the manufacturer, the responsible person, the warning text and the safety documents, and attach the group to every product type you sell in the EU. Use select lists for manufacturers and responsible persons, because a brand has a handful of them and a typo in a free-text address is still a wrong address.

Then make the fields required where the channel requires them. A product that is fine for your own webshop can still be missing the contact a marketplace needs, so the check belongs per channel, before the export runs, not in a spreadsheet afterwards.

The GPSR is one of several EU rules that end up as fields on a product. Products under sector rules also need a CE marking and an EU declaration of conformity. Packaging needs registration numbers per country, covered in the EPR packaging guide. And the digital product passport will ask for sustainability and repair data per product group once its delegated acts are adopted.