Whether the General Product Safety Regulation applies to your business depends on one simple question: do you sell a physical product to consumers in the European Union. If you sell products yourself, or have them manufactured and sold under your own brand, you are almost always one of the parties this regulation targets, regardless of whether you run a webshop, a showroom or a wholesale business.
The regulation makes barely any distinction between large and small businesses, nor between products you design yourself and products you have manufactured under your own brand. Where the precise obligations lie for your situation, and what exceptions apply, is something the product safety supervisor in your country or a lawyer can go through with you. This article explains where the question comes from and when it becomes relevant for you.
Who is this regulation intended for
The rules are aimed at everyone involved in putting a product on the market: the manufacturer, but also the importer who brings products from outside the EU, and the distributor who sells them further. For a webshop with own-brand products, this often means you fulfil multiple roles at the same time. You have something manufactured under your name, you may source it from a country outside the EU, and you sell it directly to the consumer. Each role comes with its own points of attention, and these are not the same for every business.
This makes the question "does this apply to me" harder to answer with a simple yes or no. An installation company that purchases and resells components is in a different position under the rules than a webshop that brings its own toys or kitchenware to market. Anyone in doubt about their own role would be well advised to put this to the supervisor or an adviser who knows the product category.
What is often overlooked
A common assumption is that these rules only concern toys, electronics or other "sensitive" product groups. In reality, the regulation is broadly formulated and in principle affects every consumer product for which no more specific European regulation already exists. A kitchen accessory, a garden article or a bag under your own brand can fall under it just as much as an electrical appliance. The exceptions that do exist often lie in product categories that already fall under their own, more specific legislation, and that is precisely where an individual assessment is needed.
It is also often thought that selling via a platform or marketplace reduces your own responsibility. This is something the regulation itself addresses, and you would be best advised to discuss this with a lawyer or the supervisor, rather than relying on assumptions.
Why this is connected to more than one regulation
For a webshop that sells own-brand products, product safety rarely stands alone. The same products may also fall under packaging rules as soon as they are shipped, and the website on which you sell them may face other obligations, such as those around accessibility or the handling of customer data. These are each separate assessments, with their own criteria and their own supervisor. see which platforms there are provides an overview of the areas where such questions usually come up, so you know where to go for which topic.
What these regulations have in common is that they often request the same basic information about your company and your products: your KvK number, a product description, the countries where you deliver. This is precisely where reglia plays a role: not by telling you whether the product safety regulation applies to you, but by ensuring that you don't have to re-enter that information on each platform once you've already done so elsewhere. How exactly this works, and what reglia does and doesn't do with your data, is explained on the page about how reglia works.
How to figure this out for your own company
The most reliable route is: start with the platform that covers product safety, and check there which questions are asked about your product type, origin, and sales market. If you still have doubts, the supervisor in your country or a lawyer with knowledge of product regulations is the right party to provide clarification. They can, unlike a general article, tell you something about your specific product and your specific situation.
Once you know that an obligation applies to you, the next question is usually practical: where do you need to register, which documents must you submit, and how do you keep track of that alongside everything else that's already underway. Answers to those kinds of practical questions can be found in frequently asked questions about reglia.
Would you like to see which platforms are available for product safety, packaging, accessibility and personal data, and how they work with one business dossier instead of four? Check the overview of connected platforms and read how each one can help you further.