Selling handmade products to the EU: check safety and existing cover

Does this affect my business?

Business sellers targeting EU consumers with handmade, personalised or small-batch non-food goods.

What do we know?

Identify your role and product first. Making and selling an item under your own name can make you the manufacturer. Handmade production does not create a general exemption. GPSR is the general framework; products and risks governed by specific EU safety legislation need that legislation checked as well.

Look beyond an EU contact address. For a covered product, check the risk assessment and technical documentation, product identification, manufacturer contact details and understandable safety information. Where the manufacturer is outside the EU, confirm the required EU economic operator and the actual tasks covered. An authorised representative needs a written mandate.

Match the online offer to the item delivered. Check manufacturer details, the applicable EU responsible person, product identification and warnings. A marketplace’s accepted form is useful evidence of a submission, not a guarantee of legal compliance. Article 44 leaves penalties to Member States; it does not impose a universal GPSR fine of 4% of worldwide turnover.

Start with these checks. You may already have what you need.

You can use this checklist yourself or with your existing adviser. To ask OCW, describe the missing facts in your own words. This article is available for reading and manual follow-up; it does not enable an automatic answer for this topic.