What happens if I don't have the GPSR in order?

An overview of what can follow according to the GPSR if a company fails to meet product safety obligations, without assessing how strictly this is enforced in practice.

The question many entrepreneurs ask themselves

Anyone who imports or places electronics or ICT equipment on the market will sooner or later have to deal with the General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR). A frequently asked question is then: what actually happens if I don't arrange this? The short answer is that the regulation imposes obligations on suppliers and importers regarding product safety, and that market surveillance authorities have powers to intervene when those obligations are not met. What that intervention precisely entails varies depending on the situation and the surveillance authority, and that is also precisely why this article makes no statement about what would happen in your specific case.

The regulation itself describes primarily what a company must do: conduct a risk assessment, maintain technical documentation, designate a contact point within the EU, and ensure that a product is traceable back to the manufacturer or importer. The absence of these is not a separate 'minor' breach alongside a 'serious' one — the regulation does not distinguish so sharply, but leaves the assessment to the surveillance authority that evaluates a specific product.

What powers the regulation provides

Market surveillance authorities are given instruments in the GPSR to respond when a product does not meet the requirements or when the underlying documentation is missing. This can include requesting information, having labelling or instructions amended, temporarily halting sales, or in a more advanced scenario recalling a product from the end user. Which measure is deployed depends on the nature of the risk and on how a company responds once questions arise.

It is therefore not the case that missing documentation automatically leads to the most severe measure. Surveillance authorities look at the situation as a whole: is there a concrete safety risk, has a request for supplementation been made before, and does the company cooperate in remedying the shortcoming. That said, the absence of basic documentation in itself can already be reason for a surveillance authority to initiate an investigation.

Why this is particularly relevant for electronics and ICT

Electronics and ICT equipment often fall under multiple regulations at the same time: CE marking for certain product groups, the GPSR for general product safety, and soon the digital product passport for environmental and material data. The fact that a product already bears CE marking does not automatically mean that GPSR obligations have been met — these are different regulations with a different approach. Companies that treat these regulations separately run the risk of being well prepared on one front and receiving questions on another front for which they have no answers ready.

Precisely because these regulations exist side by side, it is difficult for many SMEs to keep track of what belongs where. In the knowledge base by topic each regulation is explained separately to show what the obligation entails and where the official text can be found, so that you do not have to switch between different sources yourself.

What you can do today

Even if the delegated acts for your product group are not yet final, the GPSR already applies to products you place on the market now. It is therefore not a matter of waiting for more clarity about the digital product passport — the obligations regarding product safety are separate from that. A good starting point is to check what documentation is currently in place: a risk assessment, a traceable contact point, and information about where the product originates.

Would you like to quickly see where your company currently stands, without first having to read through the entire regulation? With the product scan that provides an indication in a few questions you get an initial picture of which aspects need attention in your situation. For the questions that remain after that, there is an overview with answers to questions that other entrepreneurs also ask.

What this article does not do

This article describes what the regulation gives competent authorities in terms of powers and why that is relevant, but makes no statement about how a competent authority would act in a concrete case, and certainly not about the likelihood of this happening at a specific company. For an assessment of your own situation, the route to the competent authority or to a lawyer is the right one, not a general article on a website.