GPSR for eBay Sellers: 2026 Requirements

If your eBay sales to Europe have quietly dried up, GPSR is the likely reason. eBay does not send you a warning. It just stops showing non-compliant listings to buyers in the EU and Northern Ireland. As one seller put it, "eBay eIS will not surface items which are not compliant in the EU and Northern Ireland." No error, no email, no flag on your listing. Your reach simply shrinks.

The General Product Safety Regulation (EU 2023/988) has applied to everything sold to EU and NI buyers since 13 December 2024. eBay confirms it plainly: GPSR "applies to new, second-hand, repaired, and reconditioned items sold on eBay and all other marketplaces." That last part is what catches eBay sellers off guard. Most marketplace guides assume you sell new, branded inventory. eBay sellers often don't. If you want the full background on the rule itself, start with what GPSR is.

What eBay actually requires on a listing

For eligible items sold to the EU and NI, eBay asks business sellers to add three pieces of data per listing:

• The manufacturer's name and contact details. A physical address, email, or both. eBay states the rule covers "the product manufacturer's name and contact information."
• An EU Responsible Person. If the manufacturer isn't based in the EU or NI, you must name someone who is. eBay is direct about it: "If the manufacturer isn't located in the EU or NI, you'll have to indicate an EU-based Responsible Person or entity, along with their name and contact details."
• Safety and compliance information in the local language. eBay lists "safety warnings, labels, and product manuals in the local language" as required. Warnings should reach buyers in the language of the country where the item is sold.

The Responsible Person is the field that trips up most sellers, because it has to be a real legal entity inside the EU or NI who agrees to hold your technical file and answer authorities. EUProof generates the GPSR compliance documents you need to put behind a listing, but it does not act as your Responsible Person. If you don't have one, read how the Responsible Person role works before you go further.

Second-hand, vintage, and the antique exemption

Here is where eBay differs from Amazon or Etsy. Your inventory is a mix of new, used, repaired, and reconditioned goods, often single-quantity and decades old. GPSR covers almost all of it.

Under Article 2, second-hand, reconditioned, and repaired goods are fully subject to safety rules unless they're explicitly sold as items to be repaired or recycled before use. Selling something "as-is" or as "decor" does not, by itself, take it out of scope. If it's a consumer product a buyer might use, it needs the GPSR data.

The one real carve-out is antiques. eBay quotes the regulation directly: "Antiques, such as works of art or collectors' items are specific categories of products which cannot be expected to meet the safety requirements laid down by this Regulation, and should therefore be excluded from its scope." In practice, EU guidance treats an item as an antique once it's at least 100 years old and holds cultural, scientific, or historical value. A 1960s lamp is not an antique. A 1910 cabinet may be. Don't stretch the definition to cover ordinary vintage stock.

This is the genuine pain for resellers. One eBay merchant summed it up: "Most of the items on my eBay site are second-hand; and, in some cases, the manufacturers and publishers have long gone out of business, or have been absorbed within newer, contemporary manufacturers — thus making it nearly impossible to comply with this aspect of the GPSR." When a manufacturer no longer exists, you still have to supply contact data and an EU Responsible Person, and "Unknown" in the manufacturer field doesn't satisfy the law even if eBay accepts the text.

Why eBay International Shipping (eIS) won't save you

A widespread belief among US and Australian sellers is that enrolling in eIS hands all GPSR work to eBay. One seller wrote, "my understanding is that eBay is managing all aspects of GPSR compliance for my items." That's wrong, and another seller corrected it well: eBay's "managing was limited to not displaying your item to those countries when the SELLER has not provided the compliance information."

eIS handles logistics. It does not generate your compliance data. If your metadata is missing, eIS simply hides the listing from EU/NI buyers. And if a non-compliant item slips through and sells, the eIS hub cancels the order, refunds the buyer, and routes your item to a liquidation center. The buyer gets their money back, so you lose both the sale and the physical product. The frustration is real: sellers have spent over a year asking eBay for clarity on third-party liability and getting, in one member's words, "crickets."

What it costs to ignore it

The financial drag shows up in four places. Sellers who block the EU outright lose an estimated 15% to 30% of gross annual sales. Researching defunct brands and writing safety warnings runs an estimated €25 to €50 per listing of labor. Intercepted eIS orders cost you the full product plus shipping. And general liability cover for selling older, untraceable goods runs roughly €500 to €1,500 a year.

For a high-volume vintage seller, the per-listing math is brutal. Unlike Amazon, where a single brand submission maps to thousands of identical ASINs, eBay's system is SKU-specific. A seller with 4,000 unique items has to enter compliance attributes 4,000 times, a process sellers describe as "burdensome" and "physically impossible." One simply gave up: "Guess I'll be excluding nearly all of Europe from my international shipments come December 2024. Too bad." Compare your situation against Amazon's GPSR setup if you sell across both platforms; the workflows are not the same.

A practical path to compliance

You can't make this zero-effort on eBay, but you can make it far cheaper than €25 to €50 a listing.

Group your inventory by category instead of treating every item as unique. eBay supports bulk-applying standardized warnings, so you can write one reusable line per category. For example: "Vintage glassware: hand wash only, do not expose to high heat." Draft a short set of category-level warnings, then apply them across matching listings.

For the manufacturer and Responsible Person fields, the data is more stable than it looks. If you resell the same brands repeatedly, you build the information once and reuse it. For products that need supporting documents, generate a GPSR-ready pack rather than writing one from scratch per item. A brief risk assessment for each product category, plus a declaration and the manufacturer details, covers most of what eBay and the authorities expect. EUProof produces those documents in minutes, which is the difference between a viable vintage business in the EU and abandoning the market.

If you genuinely sell only items that qualify as antiques or work-only-for-repair goods, document why each one is exempt. Keep that reasoning on file. "As-is decor" is not an exemption; an item over 100 years old with cultural value might be.

A few more things resellers get wrong: handmade modern crafts and prints are in scope and need full data. If a second-hand item you sold is later flagged on the Safety Gate portal, you, the seller, must cooperate with the recall and offer refunds or repairs.

Don't want to sell to the EU at all?

That's a valid choice, but do it cleanly. To exclude the EU and NI, edit your shipping profiles, delete the "Everywhere Else" option, and select only the non-EU regions you want to reach. Note that passive cross-border exposure can still surface your domestic listings to international buyers, so check that your settings actually block EU/NI rather than relying on eIS to hide things for you. As eBay notes, "If you don't sell in or ship to these regions, the GPSR isn't applicable to you."

For most sellers, though, walking away from 15% to 30% of revenue isn't the answer. Getting the documents in order is. Check whether your listings are in scope with our quick tool, and see what a compliant document pack contains before you start editing listings.

This article is general guidance, not legal advice. Confirm your obligations with a qualified advisor or your Responsible Person.