A few weeks ago we got an email from a store owner in Munich. He sells handmade leather bags on WooCommerce, maybe 200 products, nothing crazy. He woke up one morning and his entire Amazon catalog was gone. Not suspended – gone. Turns out he’d been ignoring the GPSR emails from Amazon since October.
His WooCommerce store? Still running. Still missing every single piece of required compliance data. And he had no idea that the same regulation applied there too.
We hear stories like this more often than we’d like.
Warning: Since December 13, 2024, GPSR (EU 2023/988) is mandatory for every physical product sold to EU consumers. Non-compliance can result in product removal, customs seizures, and fines up to €100,000.
Wait, what even is GPSR enforcement?
Quick background if you’re not up to speed: the General Product Safety Regulation (EU 2023/988) kicked in on December 13, 2024. Every physical product sold to EU consumers now needs to display manufacturer name, address, contact details, and – if the manufacturer isn’t based in the EU – an EU Responsible Person.
There’s more to it (product identifiers, safety warnings, country of origin) but those are the big ones.
The regulation itself isn’t new news. What is new is that people are actually getting hit by it now.
What GPSR requires on every product page
- Manufacturer name and contact details – full legal name, postal address, email, and phone number
- EU Responsible Person – required if manufacturer is outside the EU, with their contact details displayed
- Product identifiers – model number, barcode (EAN/UPC/GTIN), or other traceability codes
- Safety warnings – any relevant hazard warnings visible before purchase
- Country of origin – where the product was manufactured
Missing even one of these on a single product page means you’re non-compliant for that product.
Free tool: Not sure if your store is compliant? Run our free GPSR audit – enter your store URL and see exactly what’s missing.
Amazon moved first. Everyone else followed.
Amazon started pulling non-compliant listings in late 2024. No grace period, no friendly reminder – just poof. Listings suppressed from search results. We’ve seen sellers lose 30-40% of their visible catalog overnight because they didn’t fill in a manufacturer field.
eBay did their version a few weeks later. Etsy rolled out GPSR requirements in early 2025 (which honestly surprised us – we didn’t expect Etsy to move that fast).
Here’s the thing though. If you sell on Amazon AND run a WooCommerce store, and you’ve fixed Amazon but not WooCommerce… you’re basically compliant on the platform that checks and non-compliant on the one that doesn’t. Yet.
The fines aren’t theoretical
Each EU country enforces this independently, which makes things fun (not really). Germany’s BNetzA – that’s their market surveillance authority, try pronouncing it after two beers – can issue fines up to €100,000. France has the DGCCRF doing similar work. The Netherlands has the NVWA. Twenty-seven countries, twenty-seven agencies, zero coordination between them.
Germany
Fines up to €100,000 via BNetzA. Largest EU e-commerce market.
France
DGCCRF enforcement. Strong consumer protection culture.
27 EU countries
Each with independent enforcement. No single “safe” threshold.
And here’s what catches people off guard: these aren’t fines aimed at big retailers. A WooCommerce store doing 50 orders a month to German customers falls under exactly the same rules as one doing 50,000. The BNetzA doesn’t check your revenue before sending the letter.
Customs holds (the one nobody thinks about)
This one’s particularly nasty for dropshippers.
Products entering the EU go through customs. Under GPSR, customs officers can check whether your shipment has the required safety documentation. Package from Shenzhen arrives in Rotterdam without a listed EU Responsible Person? It sits in a warehouse. You pay storage fees. Customer gets antsy, files a chargeback. You eat the cost of the product and the chargeback fee. Double whammy.
We talked to one dropshipper who lost three shipments in January alone. Not because his products were dangerous – they were phone cases, for crying out loud – but because the compliance paperwork wasn’t there.
Your customers will report you (yes, really)
This surprises most store owners. EU consumers – especially German and Dutch ones, in our experience – actually check product pages for compliance data. Some of them know what GPSR is. When a product arrives without proper manufacturer information, a small but real percentage of buyers file complaints with their national market surveillance authority.
One complaint can trigger an investigation. That’s not us being dramatic. That’s literally how the system was designed.
Even without a formal complaint, missing compliance data on your product pages just… looks bad. It signals “this store doesn’t have its act together” and that’s not the vibe you want when someone’s hovering over the Buy button.
OK so how do you actually fix this
Look, we get it. The reason most WooCommerce stores are still non-compliant isn’t that GPSR is complicated. It’s that the idea of manually adding manufacturer data to 500 products sounds absolutely miserable. Who wants to do that?
That’s exactly why we built the GPSR Compliance plugin. You create your manufacturer records once, set a default, and bulk-apply it to your entire catalog. We’ve had stores with 10,000+ products fully compliant before lunch. The data shows up on product pages automatically and the plugin generates Schema.org structured data for Google too.
What the plugin does in 15 minutes
- Create manufacturer records – add your company or supplier details once
- Set a default manufacturer – new products get it automatically
- Bulk edit existing products – apply to your entire catalog in one click (handles 100k+ products)
- Frontend display – GPSR data appears on product pages as a tab or below Add to Cart
- Schema.org output – structured data for Google generated automatically
15 minutes. That’s genuinely all it takes for most stores. We timed it. Even stores with 10,000+ products are fully compliant within an afternoon thanks to the bulk edit wizard.
14-day money-back guarantee. Works with WooCommerce 7.0+. Setup takes 15 minutes.
The regulation isn’t going anywhere. Enforcement is ramping up, not down. Much better to deal with this on a random Tuesday afternoon than after you get the letter.
If you want to check whether your store is ready, our GPSR checklist is a good starting point. And if you want to see the plugin in action first, there’s a live demo you can poke around in.
Stay compliant out there,
The WPCODER Team
Related articles
- GPSR compliance for WooCommerce: complete guide
- GPSR compliance checklist
- Amazon GPSR requirements
- Free GPSR compliance checker
