GPSR Article 19: what every product listing must show since December 2024

A new baseline for every webshop

Since 13 December 2024, the General Product Safety Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2023/988, or GPSR) has applied. It covers nearly every consumer product sold in the EU, and explicitly includes distance selling. For webshops and wholesalers that means: not only must the product be safe, what you show online must also meet fixed rules.

Those rules sit in Article 19. It isn’t an abstract compliance text but a list of data that has to be visible in every listing before the customer buys.

What Article 19 concretely requires

Every online product offer must contain at least:

• The manufacturer: name, registered trade name or trademark, plus a postal and electronic address where they can be reached.
• The responsible person in the EU: if the manufacturer is established outside the EU, an EU-based responsible person is required (Article 16). Their name and contact details must also appear in the listing.
• Product identification: the details needed to identify the product, including an image, the type and, where relevant, a batch or serial number.
• Warnings and safety information: in a language easily understood by the consumer - in Belgium, often several languages.

It looks manageable, until you multiply it across your whole product range.

Why it gets hard at volume

For a handful of products you type it in by hand. For thousands of items from dozens of suppliers it becomes a recurring data problem:

• manufacturer and responsible-person details are rarely cleanly present in the supplier file;
• they differ per brand and change when a supplier changes;
• they have to be correct in several languages;
• and they must stay correct with every new price list or catalogue update.

So it isn’t a one-off clean-up but a check you have to repeat on every change. One missing field or one wrongly matched manufacturer, and a listing is no longer compliant.

Staying compliant at scale

A few principles keep this manageable:

• Make the fields mandatory. Treat manufacturer, responsible person, image and warnings as required product fields, not a “nice to have”. A product without that data doesn’t go live.
• Check on ingest, not after the fact. Catch missing or suspicious data the moment a supplier file arrives, before it is published to your shop or ERP.
• Keep it multilingual. Warnings in a single language don’t cover a Belgian or international audience.
• Re-check on every update. A supplier that renames a column or swaps a brand shouldn’t quietly break your compliance.

It doesn’t all have to be manual

Much of this work - ingesting supplier data, checking fields, flagging missing information and publishing in a controlled way - can be automated with a managed product-data flow. That is exactly what our service VIMM CatalogOps is built on: supplier files are ingested, checked for GPSR fields among others, and only published to Odoo and your webshop after approval. Want to run through your own listings first? Use our free GPSR checklist.

This article is informational and not legal advice. For the exact obligations applying to your products, refer to the official text of Regulation (EU) 2023/988 and your own legal adviser.