Regulation (EU) 2023/988 of the European Parliament and of the Council on general product safety, GPSR for short, has applied since 13 December 2024. Its Article 19 sets out what has to be visible in a distance offer - that is, on the product page, before the customer clicks buy. There are four groups of information.
The Czech follow-up rules are in Act No. 387/2024 Coll. on general product safety, effective from the same date. The regulation applies directly; the Act adds what the EU left to member states: who supervises and how penalties work. Supervision generally sits with the Czech Trade Inspection Authority.
The four pieces of information from Article 19
The wording below is our translation into operational language, not a quotation. The exact text is in Article 19 of the regulation and you should read it before implementing anything.
| Information | What it means in a shop |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer | Name or trademark, postal and electronic address |
| Responsible person in the EU | The same, when the manufacturer is outside the Union |
| Product identification | Type, image, and where relevant batch or serial number |
| Warnings and safety information | Those that must be on the product or with it |
Two things get overlooked most often. A link to the manufacturer's website is not enough - the regulation asks for a postal and an electronic address. And safety information is not the instruction manual: the manual says how it is used, the warning says what happens if you use it otherwise. What belongs on the shop is the second, even though the customer gets both in the box.
Warnings must be in a language the consumer readily understands. For a shop aimed at the Czech market that means Czech, including when the goods come from Germany and the documentation arrived in German.
"In the offer" means on the product page, not in the terms and conditions
This is the cheapest way to spoil otherwise finished work. The information has to be visible in the offer before the contract is concluded. A Product safety section linked from the footer does not meet that condition, because the customer need never come across it.
What this means for implementation: the information attaches to the product, not to the site, and has to reach the product detail template. A collapsible block, a tab or a table under the description are fine; a separate page in the footer is not.
Where you sit in the chain decides how much work you face
Shop owners usually assume they are distributors. Sometimes they are, often they are not.
A distributor sells goods from an EU supplier under somebody else's brand. Your duty is to verify that the product carries the required markings and that the manufacturer information exists and is truthful. Where it does not, you should not be selling the product.
An importer is whoever brings the product in from outside the EU. When you order directly from China, you are the importer, even if your trade licence says retail. An importer puts their name and address on the product or its packaging and keeps the technical documentation.
A manufacturer is also anyone who sells somebody else's goods under their own brand or modifies them substantially. A private label is the fastest way for a shop to become a manufacturer with everything that entails: risk analysis, technical documentation and responsibility for product safety.
If you carry your own range, this paragraph is the most expensive part of the whole text.
Without a responsible person in the Union a product may not go on the market
Article 16 of the regulation states that a product may not be placed on the market unless there is an economic operator established in the Union responsible for the specified tasks. That operator is an EU manufacturer, an importer, an authorised representative, or a fulfilment service provider.
For a shop this has one unpleasant form. When you buy from a non-EU manufacturer and there is nobody else in the chain, you are the responsible person. That is not a formality solved by adding a field: it means holding the documentation and being the one the inspectorate comes to.
Where to get the information when the supplier does not send it
The most common answer to "why do we not have this yet" is not "we cannot display it" but "we do not have the data". It is solved in three places, and all three are outside the shop.
In the ordering process with your supplier. Add manufacturer details to your delivery requirements and to the framework contract, so that what is missing is a document rather than your website. A supplier who will not provide the manufacturer's name and address is selling you something they themselves cannot say who is responsible for.
In the feed. When you take a catalogue over an XML feed, you need four new fields in it. Most Czech wholesalers added them after 2024, but not all of them and not across the whole range. You find out by counting how many items have the field empty, not by asking.
By filling in the remainder by hand. With the long tail of a catalogue there is no avoiding it. The good news is that the information repeats: a few dozen manufacturers cover thousands of items, provided the data model is built on the manufacturer rather than on the product.
In Shoptet the information hangs off the brand. That is both an advantage and a trap
Shoptet added fields for manufacturer contact details to the brand record, not to each product separately. The information then appears in the Other information tab on the product detail, brands can be exported and imported in bulk together with these fields, and the existing EAN field serves as the product identifier.
The brand-based model saves you most of the work. It has one consequence that only surfaces in production, though: one brand can carry only one set of details. When you sell goods from two different manufacturers or two importers under the same brand, the model will not take it, and it is solved either by splitting the brands or by adding the details into the product description.
Check two numbers on your own shop: how many products have no brand assigned, and how many brands have an empty contact field. The product of those two groups is your list of work.
In Shopify it is a metafield and a piece of the theme
Shopify has no one-click solution. Its own GPSR help exists, but implementation is on you and in practice runs through product metafields.
The usual setup looks like this: the namespace gpsr with the keys manufacturer_name, manufacturer_address, manufacturer_email and eu_responsible_person. They are created in Settings and metafields, populated in bulk over CSV or an app, and output in the product detail template, in modern themes in main-product.liquid.
Anyone who does not want to touch code reaches for an app from the Shopify App Store. That works out cheaper than an hour of development but adds another monthly line and another dependency. You can decide on whether you are editing the theme anyway: if you are, metafields are cheaper and stay yours.
A more elegant option for larger catalogues is a "manufacturer" metaobject with a reference to it from the product. It then behaves like Shoptet's brand model, only without its limitation: one product can reference a manufacturer and an importer separately.
Dropshipping has no elegant solution
When you never hold the goods, you have no way to verify what is on the packaging, and you are still responsible for the offer. There are three realistic options and all of them cost something.
The first is to require both the data and the responsibility from the supplier contractually, in writing. The second is to limit your range to EU suppliers who provide the information in the feed. The third is to accept the importer's role with all its duties, which in dropshipping means the model stops being cheap.
What does not work is the fourth option, the one we see most often: keep selling and hope. GPSR gives supervisory authorities tools that reach distance offers too, and the cost is not only a fine but also having the offer withdrawn from sale.
What GPSR does not cover
The regulation is a safety net. Where a product has its own harmonising legislation, that applies first. And whole categories are excluded from its scope, among them medicinal products, food, feed, living plants, animal by-products, plant protection products, aircraft and antiques.
That does not mean things are quiet there. It means the obligations are found elsewhere, and for food or cosmetics they are usually stricter than GPSR.
When something happens, it gets reported and customers get written to
Shops leave this part for later, and that is a mistake, because it concerns operations rather than the product page.
An accident caused by a product is reported by the economic operator through the European Safety Business Gateway portal. In the event of a recall the notice goes directly to every affected customer you are able to identify - and in a shop you can identify them practically always, because you have the orders.
A recall notice has prescribed content, and the regulation explicitly forbids wording that reduces the perception of risk, meaning words like voluntary, precautionary or in exceptional cases. The required content of the notice is in Article 36(2) of the regulation, and remedies for the consumer in Article 37: at least two options out of repair, replacement and refund must be offered.
What to do this week
This is not a quarterly project, it is a stocktake. Work in this order, because each step shrinks the next one.
- Take your ten best-selling items and check whether all four pieces of information are present. Not in the system - on the product page.
- Count what percentage of the catalogue is missing manufacturer information. That number decides whether the answer is a feed or manual work.
- Find out how many of your suppliers are outside the EU. For those, you are the importer.
- Ask your suppliers in writing whether they will provide the information in the feed, and by when.
- Only then work out where you will display it on the site.
Most shops start at point five and are surprised it never ends.
You want it implemented, not described
We handle both the data and the display as ordinary shop work: fields in the admin, import from the supplier feed, output in the product template, and a check on how many items are still empty. What we build and on what is on the e-shop development page.
We do not carry out a legal assessment of your range and will not pretend otherwise. With a private label and with imports from third countries, the first consultation belongs to a lawyer; we follow on with the implementation.
Write to info@lamapixel.com or call +420 775 599 009.
Legal position verified as of 3 September 2026: Regulation (EU) 2023/988 and Act No. 387/2024 Coll. A review of this article is scheduled for 28 February 2027.
