GPSR: which product data your listings now need

A note up front: this article looks at the GPSR from a product data perspective. It is not legal advice, and it does not replace checking your specific obligations with qualified counsel or reading the regulation itself.

The EU General Product Safety Regulation — Regulation (EU) 2023/988, applicable since 13 December 2024 — is usually discussed in legal terms. For a retailer, though, its practical effect is surprisingly mundane: a set of information has to be present on your product listings, for every product, on every channel, in the right language.

In other words: it's a data completeness problem wearing a legal hat.

What it changes for online offers

In broad terms, the regulation requires that a consumer buying at a distance can identify the product and the economic operators behind it, and can see relevant safety information before purchase. In practice this means offers need to carry things like:

• Manufacturer information — name, registered trade name or trademark, and contact details including a postal and electronic address.
• A responsible person in the EU where the manufacturer is established outside the EU, with their contact details.
• Product identification — including an image, type, and any identifier such as a batch or model reference.
• Warnings and safety information, provided in a language easily understood by consumers in the country of sale.

The exact scope, wording and exemptions are set by the regulation — treat the above as orientation, not a checklist to rely on.

Why this is genuinely hard for multi-brand retailers

Not because any single field is complicated. Because of coverage:

• The information has to come from every brand you carry — and brands deliver it inconsistently, if at all.
• It must exist for the whole assortment, including the longtail where supplier data is thinnest.
• It has to appear on every channel, each with its own field structure.
• It has to be in the right language per market.

If you sell 20,000 articles from 40 brands across four channels, this is not something you solve by editing listings.

Treat it as structured data, not listing text

The sustainable approach is to model the requirements as attributes rather than free text pasted into descriptions:

1. Define the fields once — manufacturer name, address, email, responsible person, warnings, safety notices.
2. Collect per supplier, not per product. Most of these values are identical for every article of a brand; gather them once at supplier level.
3. Make gaps visible. A completeness view per product group turns “are we compliant?” into a countable list.
4. Translate systematically so the same notice exists in every market language.
5. Publish per channel into whichever field each marketplace expects.

Where a PIM helps

This is squarely product information management: defined attributes per product group, values inherited from supplier level, completeness visible before publishing, translation handled centrally, and channel-specific export. Productbay is built for exactly the multi-brand case where these fields have to be maintained across many suppliers at once — but whichever tooling you use, the principle is the same: model it as data, not as text.

What that looks like in practice — mandatory fields per product group, an approval workflow, versioned safety documents and per-channel publishing — is covered on PIM for product compliance and GPSR. It also takes in the adjacent regimes CE, REACH, LMIV and MDR, which need the same data structure.

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