General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR): obligations and risks for businesses

Lawyer Giuseppe Croari – Dr. Silvia Di Paola

In May 2023 the EU Regulation 2023/988known as General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR). This regulation aims to improve the functioning of the internal market and ensure a high level of protection for consumers.

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The GPSR introduces fundamental rules for the safety of consumer products, repealing, starting from December 13, 2024the previous one directive 2001/95/CE. The main innovation consists in regulation of the online marketdesigned to address the growing diffusion of digital sales.

The regulation applies in the absence of specific provisions of Union law dealing with the safety of certain products. In these cases, discipline general (horizontal) of the GPSR integrates any regulations specifications (vertical)intervening only in areas not covered by the latter.

What is meant by “safe product”?

The GPSR offers a more detailed definition of “safe product” than the old directive, considering a wider range of factors, including:

• the characteristics of the product;
• the effect of the product on other products;
• the effect that other products may have on the product being evaluated;
• the presentation of the product, as well as its labelling, including that relating to suitability for children;
• the categories of consumers who use the product;
• the appearance of the product when it can lead consumers to use it in a different way from that for which it was designed;
• where the nature of the product so requires, the appropriate cybersecurity features;
• and finally, if required by the nature of the product, the evolutionary, learning and predictive functions of the product.

The GPSR therefore provides for a general safety obligation for which economic operators are required to place or make available on the market only safe products.

Obligations for sales platforms

With specific regard to online sales, the GPSR provides that “products offered for sale online or through other distance selling channels” are considered “made available on the market if the offer is intended for consumers in the Union”.

The European legislatorin this way, equates the sale online with the offline one; to be subject to the regulation, a double condition is sufficient, namely that a product be presented online for sale and that this sale is intended for consumers in the Union.

Having said this, and therefore with a view to guaranteeing the safety of the products, the GPSR then provides that online platforms, understood as “suppliers of an online marketplace”, must fulfill a series of new obligations.

In particular, they must:

• register on the portal Safety Gate, i.e. on a web portal that allows consumers to report problems and dangerous products to national and European authorities;
• indicate theirs single point of contactwhich allows recipients of the products to communicate with them;
• arrange internal processes for product safety;
• make information relating to the information available to consumers manufacturer or to person responsible for the entry on the market, product identification and any product warnings.
• The supervisory authorities, on the other hand, can order the platforms in question to remove specific contentor of insert a specific warning that refers to the offer of a dangerous product.

The new consumer rights

Additional forms of protection are also provided with respect to consumers’ right to information.

And in fact, the regulation establishes that economic operators instruct a person responsible for the products sold online and offline, who makes the technical documentation, instructions and information on product safety available; the documentation in question must be updated and made available to the market surveillance authorities for a period of ten years from the date on which the product was placed on the market; the information on the product and the manufacturer must be placed on the product itself or, if this is not possible, on the packaging or accompanying document.

Consumers then have the right to receive the so-called recall noticeswhich means that in the event of a product recall, sellers are obliged to inform all interested consumers, providing them with the information necessary to identify the product as well as the danger associated with it.

What will this mean for companies?

For operators and therefore for companies, the application of GPSR requires that they invest in advanced technological solutions and that compliance and monitoring structures are strengthened; therefore it involves an adjustment cost that the system deems to be adequate in light of the equally significant need for consumer safety and protection (for more information on the latest interventions to the regulation of consumption in our system click here).

If you are a company and have doubts about how to protect your business, contact our partners at FCLEX Law Firmoperate throughout Italy and will be able to help you identify the best solutions for your specific case.