Effective from 13 December 2024, the General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) aims to ensure the sale of safe products to buyers in the European Union (EU) and Northern Ireland (NI). This regulation applies to both new and second-hand products sold in these markets, and it introduces specific requirements for businesses regarding product safety information.
To comply with the GPSR, eBay have advised all business sellers listing items for sale in the EU and NI that they must include a ton of information in their listings and the fields are now live. Bear in mind, you’ll also need this information (perhaps in a different format) for every other platform you sell on.
GPSR information required on eBay
- The product manufacturer’s name and contact information
- If the manufacturer isn’t located in the EU or NI, you’ll have to indicate an EU-based Responsible Person or entity, along with their name and contact details
- Any relevant product information like model number, pictures, type, and CE marking
- Product safety and compliance information like safety warnings, labels, and product manuals in the local language
GPRS Impact for seller’s and man hours required
I spoke to one seller who has over 5,000 listings available in six languages, and the impact for them is that with the Product Safety Information required as pictograms they’ll need to upload 30,000 images by the 13th of December… and that’s after they’ve created the images in the first place! And once they’ve dealt with the images, they still have to add in the data fields GPRS requires.
Your first step should be to talk to your multichannel management supplier and ask if they support uploading the required data.
We’ve heard separately that businesses are struggling to obtain manufacture information for some products. It’s going to take time and if you want to continue to sell to the EU and the part of the UK that is Northern Ireland it’s a job that needs starting straight away! One supplier point blank refused to even tell a business who the product manufacturer is – not entirely surprising as they don’t really want all of their customers going direct.
We’ve also heard from sellers in the collectibles category – what do you do when you have a relatively old product, perhaps not over 100 years old but one for which the manufacturer no longer exists? It will be impossible to obtain the required information and on the face of things it looks like sales to the EU will simply shut down for this sector.
Responsible Person Costs
You will need a Responsible Person who can be one of the following and must be located in the EU or NI:
- The manufacturer
- An importer
- An authorised representative of the manufacturer
- A fulfilment service provider if the manufacturer, importer, and authorised representative aren’t based in the EU or NI
We’ve been researching costs for a Responsible Person to act on your behalf, and the very cheapest we’ve heard of (for a product that is paper based so pretty safe in comparison to say an escooter) was around £1500 per year. That’s an indication of the starting point for what you’ll be charged as a minimum for someone who will effectively just rubber stamp the paperwork you gather to sell to the EU and Northern Ireland.
GPRS and Northern Ireland on eBay
As Northern Ireland is part of the EU so far as GPRS goes due to the various BREXIT agreements, sellers are asking if they can exclude sales to the territory and sell to Great Britain only. We understand eBay don’t currently easily enable this but they are working on a solution to separate Northern Ireland from Great Britain which should be in place before the 13th December deadline. This means if you only sell to the UK and don’t want (or can’t) obtain and upload the data and images required in time, you’ll still be able to sell to Great Britain.
11 Responses
I hope people can now see what a terrible idea this is.
Sadly it’s needed due to all the Chinese sellers flooding marketplaces and being the dominant sellers in many categories. With slim chance of obtaining any contact should an accident happen.
The rules would need to cover everyone thou, otherwise, it seem like ‘protectionism’
There are other ways of solving the problem you mention (which is not quite how the EU briefs describe it) which wouldn’t have a mass of negative unintended consequences to go with it.
Sadly, the EU way is always legislation. It tends not to work out how they thought (eg. the cookies law) as loopholes and ways around things will always be found.
I’m glad UK businesses are not compelled to follow for now, so at least we’ll get a chance to see what damage it does to EU businesses, and then brace ourselves for the good news from the PM that we’re joining in.
What I realised when I edited an ebay UK listing, was just that, it was a UK listing!
It had the GPSR boxes for information on there.
I know that items from the UK can be sold worldwide but how would one know what eu country will be buying my product to have the correct language in the pictogram on the UK site?
Should I display as French, Italian or German or Irish. You get the gist.
I think marketplaces should be lobbying the government to get a deal, because, as far as I see it, many many businesses will not be able to trade with the EU and that means loss of money for the market places and lets face it, that’s all they care about.
I should give ebay a call to ask them.
Just for a laugh!
We think we’ve got it bad, but the EU businesses and NI businesses will have to comply with all this. No choice for them of simply opting out and accepting a small loss of market share.
Imagine you are a NI based and a specialist retro seller. Mostly you do single item listings, one-offs. For a lot of the items you sell, the manufacturer no longer exists. How will you provide this information that cannot be provided? Would it be worthwhile, even if you could?
Maybe you are in France, and you’ve carved yourself out a good share of the market. No one knows where you get your products from, and this has helped you remain market leader for years. But now, if someone wants to know what manufacturer makes your products, and take you on for that slice of the market, all they have to do is buy your product and read your GPSR.
Instead of us lobbying the UK government to get a deal (not going to happen, EU knows best and this is “about safety”) the rest of the EU should be getting mad with their governments.
“We think we’ve got it bad, but the EU businesses and NI businesses will have to comply with all this. No choice for them of simply opting out and accepting a small loss of market share.”
Can you show me where in the legislation it says that NI businesses can’t opt out.
I am a NI online Ebay and own website business, currently only sell to the UK, and I was intending to also opt out of selling to my home province NI, and only selling to England, Scotland and Wales in December.
I never considered a NI seller opting out of selling to NI and just selling to the rest of the UK. It’d be interesting to find out if any other NI sellers want to do the same. If there is an option/rule for or against it, I can’t find it, maybe because the powers that be haven’t considered the possibility either.
Good luck with it. There might be a few awkward and angry exchanges from would-be-buyers, particularly if you hold stock in NI, but won’t distribute within NI. Refusing sales does not go down well.
Cheers. Agreed, my website Trustpilot rating may take a bit of a hammering from NI customer refusals.
You can already remove Northern Ireland from countries of selling. You go to your business policies and edit each shipping policy you have. You then go to Exclude postage locations and northern ireland and the EU are examples you can exclude. You would also need to opt out of global shipping. It works fine and you can check it is set up by visiting one of your own listings and checking only united kingdom shows as the country you post to and under the postcode try to enter any northern ireland postcode and it should say “Item doesn’t post to Northern Ireland”
https://www.ebay.co.uk/ship/prf