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EU compliance

What general product safety rules now require on an online product listing

The product page is no longer just marketing. European general product safety law made the listing itself a regulated object, with information that has to be visible before anyone clicks buy.

China → France

For a long time, an online listing was judged by whether it sold. The photograph, the title, the bullet points, the keywords: everything on the page served conversion, and compliance lived somewhere else — on the label, in the box, in a folder on a server. That separation no longer holds. European général product safety legislation treats the offer itself as a place where obligations attach, which means a page that sells well and says nothing can be non-compliant even if the product in the warehouse is perfect.

Why the listing itself became a regulated object

The reasoning behind it is simple enough to accept. When a consumer buys in a shop, the product is in their hands: they can read the label, see the warning, check who made it. When the same consumer buys online, the only thing available before payment is the listing. If the listing hides what the label would have shown, the consumer has been deprived of the information the law intended them to have. So the obligation moved upstream, to the offer, and it applies whether the offer sits on your own shop or on a marketplace.

What has to appear on the listing before anyone buys

  • The identity of the manufacturer. Name and a postal address, plus an electronic contact point. The name of your brand is not the name of a manufacturer, and a city alone is not an address. This is the information a consumer uses to work out who actually made the thing.
  • The identity of the responsible person established in the Union. When the manufacturer is outside the Union, the listing has to name the party inside it that answers for the product, with an address that can receive a letter. This is the single hardest field for a seller who never designated anyone — and it cannot be filled with a freight forwarder's address chosen because it was handy.
  • What identifies the product. The elements that let a particular item be recognised: type, batch or serial reference, model, and a picture of the product as it will actually arrive. This is what makes a recall possible later, which is exactly why it is required now.
  • The warnings and the safety information. In the language of the country where the product is offered. A choking hazard, an age restriction, an instruction not to use the item near water: if it belongs on the packaging, it belongs on the page, in words the buyer in that country reads without translating.

Why a PDF, a packaging photograph or a « contact us » line does not count

The requirement is that the information be visible before the purchase, on the offer, in a form the buyer can read without effort. A downloadable manual fails because it is after the purchase in practice and because nobody opens it. A photograph of the back of the box fails because text in an image is not readable by everyone and because it is usually unreadable at the size shown. A line inviting the customer to write in for details fails for the most obvious reason: it puts the burden on the person the rule was written to protect. The test to apply to your own page is blunt — can a buyer, before paying, read who is responsible and what the warnings say, in their own language, without clicking anything.

Why marketplaces now delist on their own initiative

A marketplace is not a neutral shelf any more. It has its own obligations about the offers it hosts, it can be ordered to remove them, and it receives notices from authorities. Faced with that, it does what any platform does when the cost of a wrong listing lands on it: it builds an automatic check, it makes the fields mandatory, and it suspends the offers that fail rather than arguing case by case. The removal usually arrives as a short automated message naming a missing field, not as a discussion. Sellers experience this as arbitrary. It is the opposite: it is a platform applying a rule that it will be held to, at the only speed its catalogue allows. The practical consequence is that the appeal is rarely a conversation about the product: it is a form, and it reopens only when the field that triggered the removal has been filled properly.

What this costs a seller with a long catalogue

With a handful of references, this is an afternoon of work. With a whole catalogue, it is a different problem entirely, because the information does not exist in one place and never did. The manufacturer name sits in the factory contract. The responsible person sits in a mandate somebody signed. The batch reference sits in production. The warnings sit in the artwork files, in Chinese, and the translations have to be made for every language you sell in. A seller who treats this as a listing-copy task will fix the pages that were flagged and keep being flagged; a seller who treats it as a data problem fills the fields once, at source, and pushes them everywhere. The second route is slower to start and is the only one that ends.

  1. Designate the responsible person established in the Union first, because every listing needs its name and address and no amount of catalogue work can proceed without it.
  2. Build one table, product by product, holding manufacturer identity, responsible person, identification elements and warnings. One row per reference, one column per required field, and empty cells visible rather than hidden.
  3. Have the warnings translated into the languages of the countries you actually offer in, and keep them in the table rather than only in the artwork, so the page and the label never drift apart.
  4. Start with the references that sell, not with the ones at the top of the spreadsheet. A delisting hurts in proportion to the revenue behind the page.
  5. Retire the references you cannot document. A product whose manufacturer you cannot name is a product you cannot defend, and carrying it costs more than the margin it brings.

Read your three best-selling pages as a consumer in the country where they sell, on a telephone, without logging in. If you cannot find the manufacturer, the responsible person and the warnings before the buy button, neither can the inspector who will look at the same page. Fix those pages before touching the rest of the catalogue: the listings that earn are the listings that get reported, and a delisting on a reference that carries your season is the expensive version of this lesson.

Where to read it yourself

Official pages, opened and checked on 15 October 2026. Where a rule changes, these are the addresses that change with it — this article does not.

Questions we get on this.

Is it enough to put the information in the downloadable manual?

No. The obligation attaches to the offer, which means the information has to be readable before the purchase decision, on the page, without a download and without a request. A manual is something the buyer meets after paying, and a file nobody opens does not inform anybody. The same reasoning rules out a photograph of the packaging as the sole carrier: text inside an image is not reliably readable, at that size or by assistive software. Put the text in the page, in the language of the country where the offer is made.

The marketplace removed our listing without warning. What do we do first?

Read the message and find the named field, because the removal is almost always triggered by one missing element rather than by a judgement on the product. Fill that field properly, not with a placeholder, since a second rejection is slower to reverse than the first. Then look at every other reference that shares the same gap, because the check that caught one page will reach the others. If the missing element is the European responsible person, the listing cannot be fixed by editing text: somebody has to be designated, and that takes a contract.

Does this apply to our own website, or only to marketplaces?

It applies to the offer, wherever the offer is made. A seller's own shop is an offer to consumers in the Union exactly as a marketplace listing is, and the information requirements are the same. The practical difference is who enforces them: a marketplace checks automatically and removes the page, while your own site is checked by a surveillance authority or reported by a competitor or a consumer association. The second route is slower and lands harder, because by the time it reaches you the whole catalogue is in question rather than one listing.

Keep reading on this.

France–ChinaFrom a Chinese factory to Amazon Europe: the four things that are not the productSourcing is the part people prepare for. What stops accounts is tax registration, producer responsibility, the compliance identity on the listing, and who is named as the responsible person.EU compliancePackaging and labelling for Europe: what has to be on the boxThe box is a legal document as much as a piece of marketing. Getting it wrong stops a shipment at a border or forces a relabelling campaign at your expense.France / EuropeMarketplace or distributor: two ways into Europe, and what each one keepsOne gives you customers next month and no relationship with them. The other takes a year and leaves you a market position. Most companies need both, in an order that depends on the product.EU complianceThe technical file: who can ask for it, what goes in it, and how long you keep itA test report and a technical file are not the same document, and a factory that holds the first usually believes it holds the second. The difference becomes expensive the day an authority asks.

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