Sell into the EU: the compliance requirements, and which ones do not apply to you

The rules that can bind you fall into five groups: the safety and conformity of the product itself, packaging and end-of-life, tax and customs, data protection and platform rules, and sector regimes for things like cosmetics, medical devices and food. A business shipping one unregulated homeware item into one country touches a handful. A business shipping electronics into six countries touches most of them.

This page lists all 23. It is honest about which ones we have read. 3 are read from the published text at publications.europa.eu with the article printed beside the claim. The other 20 are named and not yet read, and they say so in their own row. We would rather show you a gap than fill it with something we were told second-hand.

The obligation map

Every regime below can bind a business selling into the EU from outside it. No page we could find publishes them together: each competitor covers exactly one, and the marketplaces tell you about the rules they enforce and nothing about the rest. That gap is the reason this page exists.

Read the Source column first. Where it shows an article number, we opened the Official Journal text and read that article. Where it showsnamed only, we know the instrument exists and we have not read it, so the row carries no trigger, no deadline, no authority and no penalty. A boundary stated from memory is the exact failure this site exists to be the opposite of.

20 of 23 rows are named from secondary sources and have not yet been read against the Official Journal. Those rows say so, and they carry no trigger, no deadline, no authority and no penalty, because we have not read one. 3 rows are read at the article shown. We publish the gap rather than hide it, and rows are not reordered to put the verified ones first.

Does any of this apply to you?

Start with product safety, because it reaches the widest and because it is the part we have actually read. Our GPSR guide walks through whether it binds you and which of its duties fall away.

The obligations, one by one

What each group is about, and what we can and cannot say about it today.

What counts as selling into the EU

You do not need a warehouse, a subsidiary or an EU bank account to be inside the scope of these rules. Under GPSR the trigger is making a product available on the EU market, and a product offered online to consumers in the Union counts as available there, wherever you and your stock sitArt. 4.

The practical tests are the ones you would expect: whether your shop takes orders from EU addresses, whether prices show in euro or a member-state currency, whether you ship there, and whether a marketplace lists you to EU buyers. Being reachable is not the same as targeting, and the line between them is decided on the facts of the offer.

Where the other 20 regimes draw their own lines, we have not read them, so this page does not say. Do not read the GPSR test as the test for VAT, for packaging or for data protection. Each of those draws its boundary differently, and several draw it per country rather than per Union.

What to keep on file

Compliance is proved from records, not from intentions, and the records are usually demanded at the worst moment - a customs hold, a marketplace listing suspension, or a market surveillance authority asking a question with a deadline attached.

At category level, expect to hold: the technical documentation and risk analysis behind the product, the identity and mandate of whoever acts for you inside the Union, your registrations and their numbers, evidence of what you reported and when, and the labelling and instructions as they actually shipped.

Retention periods differ by regime and we have read only GPSR's, which is ten years for the manufacturer's technical documentationArt. 9. Do not assume ten years is the answer everywhere.

Who inside a company owns this

Where there is no separate function for it, this lands on the owner, because there is nobody else to hand it to. Where the company is large enough to have functions, it is usually split, and the split is where things get dropped: product safety sits with the product or quality function, tax registrations with finance, data protection with legal or IT, and marketplace account health with whoever runs the channel.

The failure is predictable. Each function assumes another one holds the obligation, and nobody holds the list. That is the argument for keeping one inventory like the table above, owned by one named person, rather than four partial views.

Ownership varies by company structure; not mapped in our research yet.

Briefing a supplier or a marketplace

Most of what binds you depends on facts only your supplier holds: what the product is made of, what it contains, how it is packaged, and what documentation already exists for it. Ask for those before you ask a compliance question, because the answer changes with them.

A useful brief names the product, the exact materials and components, the intended user, every country you will ship to, and the channel. With a marketplace, ask which obligations it enforces at listing time and which it leaves entirely to you. Marketplaces publish the first list and rarely publish the second, and the second is the one that gets you.

Whatever a marketplace requires is a floor, not a ceiling. It can and does ask for more than the law does, and meeting its checklist is not the same as meeting the law.

What this page does not cover

We have not verified any national penalty figures, so this page does not repeat any. The same goes for fees: EPR scheme charges vary by country, by material and by volume, and the figures circulating in secondary sources did not survive checking, so none are printed here.

It does not cover per-country detail, which is where most of the real work sits. It does not give staged future dates for regimes we have not read, including the packaging regulation, whose phase-in dates exist and are not yet read against the Official Journal by us. It is not legal advice, and it does not replace reading the text for the one rule that binds you.

Why no providers are listed here

This site earns money, and it says so plainly. It earns from disclosed partner links on guides, where a reader who already has the answer may want somebody to do the work. Every such link carries an unpaid route to the same thing beside it, and the arrangement is stated where you see the link, not in a footer.

None of that appears on this page, and it is not an oversight. This page is the map. A reader who meets a sales offer before they have their bearings has no way to tell the map from the sales pitch, and after that neither do we. The full rules are in the editorial policy.

How this page stays current

The date at the top is the day this page was last read against its sources, not the day it was published. When a rule moves, the change is dated in the changelog and the page it touches is updated. When we get something wrong, the correction is logged on the corrections page with what was wrong and when it was fixed, rather than quietly edited away.

The 20 unread rows are the work queue. Each one becomes a guide when someone has read its text and can print the article beside the claim, and its row in the table above changes from named only to a citation on the same day. You can watch the column fill.