GPSR Exemptions: Which Products Are Out of Scope (and Which Only Look Exempt)

A lot of sellers go looking for an exemption and read it too generously. They find that their product type "has its own rules" and conclude GPSR doesn't touch them. That conclusion is usually wrong, and it's an expensive one when a marketplace pulls the listing.

GPSR, Regulation (EU) 2023/988, is a safety net. It's written to catch every consumer product that doesn't already have a more specific safety law. So the question isn't really "is my product exempt?" It's "is my product fully covered by another EU safety law, and if so, does that law cover everything?" For the full picture of the regulation, start with what GPSR is.

The two kinds of "exempt"

There's a difference that trips people up:

• Formally out of scope. A short list of product categories the regulation simply doesn't apply to.
• Covered by a more specific law. The product is still a regulated consumer product, but another EU law leads. GPSR then applies only to the risks that law doesn't address. This is not an exemption. It's a handoff with leftovers.

Most sellers who think they're exempt are in the second group, not the first.

What GPSR formally excludes

Article 2 of the regulation lists the categories it does not apply to. In plain terms:

• Medicinal products for human or veterinary use
• Food and feed
• Living plants and animals, genetically modified organisms and micro-organisms in contained use, and products of plants and animals relating to their future reproduction
• Animal by-products and derived products
• Plant protection products (pesticides)
• Equipment that consumers ride or travel on which is operated by a service provider as part of a service (think a fairground ride run by an operator)
• Aircraft of the limited categories excluded under the EU aviation rules
• Antiques

If your product is on that list, you're genuinely out of scope. For almost everything sold on Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, and eBay, it isn't on the list.

Where sellers get caught

"My product has its own directive, so I'm done." Toys follow the Toy Safety Directive, cosmetics the Cosmetics Regulation, electronics the Low Voltage and EMC rules. Those take precedence, but GPSR still applies to the general safety aspects they don't cover, and the traceability and contact-information duties still bite. You are not exempt; you have two sets of obligations to reconcile. See GPSR vs CE marking for how the two layers sit together.

"It's handmade, so it doesn't count." GPSR has no carve-out for handmade or small-business sellers. Volume and craft status are irrelevant to scope.

"It's digital." A pure download with no physical item is generally outside GPSR. The moment there's a physical product, the software inside it is part of that product's safety story. We go deeper in GPSR for digital products.

"It's second-hand." Antiques are excluded, but other used and second-hand goods sold by a trader can still be in scope. Don't assume.

How to actually decide

Work it in three steps. First, check the formal exclusion list above. If you're on it, stop. Second, check whether a specific EU law fully governs your product's safety. If one does, follow it, and confirm what it leaves to GPSR. Third, if neither fully removes you, you're in scope and you run the same requirements as any other seller.

When you're in scope, the work is the same loop every time: answer a few questions about the product, and EUProof drafts the risk assessment, technical file, label, and Declaration of Conformity from your answers. Being in scope isn't the hard part. The paperwork was, and that's the part we take off your desk.