A shop opens sales into the EU and runs into something that is not logistics: a field the product page does not have. Since 13 December 2024 the General Product Safety Regulation applies, and it requires that a buyer sees — before purchase — who made the product, how to reach them, and what safety warnings apply. No data, no listing: marketplaces remove the card themselves, without waiting for a complaint.
Below: which fields are actually required, why the product description is the wrong place for them, and how to check a thousand cards without opening each one. This is one of the legal requirements that cannot be deferred — it does not threaten a fine some day, it removes a listing today.
What changed compared to «just selling»
Safety obligations used to sit mostly with the manufacturer and the importer, while the shop was a seller. GPSR made distance selling a case of its own: if a product is offered online, a defined set of data must be in the offer itself, not «available on request».
| Required | Where it must be visible |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer name and address | in the product offer |
| Contact for enquiries | in the product offer |
| EU responsible person (for non-EU goods) | in the product offer |
| Safety warnings and cautions | in the product offer |
| Product identification (image, type, batch) | in the product offer |
The operative words are «in the offer» — on the page the buyer sees before pressing Buy, not in a PDF that opens after the order.
Why the product description is the wrong place
The temptation is obvious: paste the manufacturer into the description and consider it handled. Three reasons that creates a problem instead of solving one.
The data is unstructured. A description is free text. You cannot validate it automatically, export it for a marketplace, or render it as a separate block where it belongs. When a marketplace asks for a feed of manufacturer data, someone reads descriptions by hand.
The data is duplicated. One manufacturer, a hundred products. An address change means a hundred edits, and some will be missed. Six months later the catalogue holds three versions of one address and none is certainly current.
The data cannot be translated separately. A safety warning must be in the language of the market. Inside a description it lives inside the description's translation — and quietly disappears when the text is updated.
How this works in CommerCentr
The Compliance plugin adds compliance data as a separate layer, not a field in the description. The layer is split by the nature of the data, and that split is the part worth understanding.
Manufacturer data attaches to the brand. Name, address and contact are entered once on the manufacturer card and flow to every product of that brand. The address changes in one place.
Safety warnings attach to the product. They are individual: «not for children under three» applies to a specific item, not to a whole brand. Warnings have their own language versions, so an English market sees English text rather than a machine translation of the description.
Market-specific fields appear when needed. A shop selling only domestically should not have to look at UKCA and Prop 65 fields — they are shown conditionally, by active market. UKCA is the British conformity marking introduced after Brexit; Prop 65 is a Californian requirement to warn about substances on that state's list. Both matter only to those actually selling there.
The listing gate: why a card does not go out empty
The expensive mistake here is not wrong data — it is a product going on sale without any. A removed listing costs more than the lost sales of that item: marketplaces keep a running record of violations, and the second time is more expensive than the first.
Hence the gate: a product without the mandatory data does not enter an EU listing. Completeness is evaluated as a condition, not as an «I confirm» checkbox — the manufacturer must have a name and an address, and the shop must have a responsible person configured if the goods originate outside the EU.
The responsible person is a concept that is easy to miss. It is a natural or legal person inside the EU whom the market surveillance authority contacts. A non-EU seller cannot be their own: it takes an authorised representative, an importer, or a fulfilment operator in the Union. The plugin has two fields for this — name and address — and the gate asks for them first.
Auditing a thousand cards without opening them
With twenty products you can see completeness by eye. At a thousand the question is different: «how many are incomplete, and which ones». Clicking through cards is not work, it is the appearance of work.
That is the paid boundary. Compliance Pro adds a bulk catalogue check: one report shows the total, how many are incomplete, and a per-item reason — what exactly is missing, the manufacturer, the address, or any link to a brand at all.
One technical detail that matters to the user: the report is computed with a single set-based query rather than a loop over products. That is the difference between a second and several minutes on a ten-thousand-item catalogue. The completeness condition is identical to the free per-card check — the report cannot say «complete» where the card says otherwise.
The second half of the extension is exporting compliance data as one file. Marketplaces and customs brokers ask for this as a table, and assembling it by hand from the admin is a classic half-day task. The file opens in Excel without encoding gymnastics: BOM plus semicolons, because otherwise Cyrillic turns to noise and rows land in the wrong columns.
A word on the safety of that file, since it is rarely considered: a manufacturer name is typed by a human in the admin, which makes it user input. A value beginning with an equals sign is executed by Excel as a formula on open. The export neutralises this — otherwise a file sent to a partner becomes a way to run something on their machine.
Where to start
- Fill in the responsible person in plugin settings — without it the gate passes nothing, and the rest of the work is wasted.
- Work through manufacturers, not products. There are far fewer, and each closes dozens of cards.
- Add safety warnings to the products that genuinely need them: children's items, chemicals, electricals, anything with small parts. An empty field beats a formality.
- Check language versions of warnings for the markets you sell to.
- Run the bulk check and work through what remains, by reason.
The order matters because each step shrinks the next. Running the bulk check against an empty database will honestly report that everything is incomplete — which tells you nothing.
What this does not do
The plugin does not verify that a product is actually safe, nor that it holds the right certificates. It stores and displays the data you entered, and refuses to release a card without the mandatory minimum. Substantive compliance is a question for the product and its documents.
It also does not replace a lawyer and does not interpret the regulation. What exactly must be stated depends on the category: toys, electronics and cosmetics carry sector rules on top of the general ones.
And filled fields are no guarantee that a marketplace will not remove a listing. They remove the most common cause — missing data — but platforms have their own rules, stricter than the regulation.
Summary
GPSR turned manufacturer data from paperwork into a condition of sale: absent from the offer means no offer. Technically it comes down to three things — store the data structurally rather than in a description; attach it where it naturally belongs (manufacturer to brand, warnings to product); and do not release a card without the mandatory minimum.
Those three work for free in CommerCentr. The paid extension answers the one question that appears on a large catalogue — «which products are not ready yet» — and hands the data over as a table when a partner asks for it.
One practical note: do not wait for the first removed listing. Filling a catalogue takes a few evenings; restoring standing on a platform takes months.
See also refunding a customer — EU buyers exercise that right more actively — and Nova Poshta shipping for parcels going the other way.