INTRO 

When selling on Amazon Europe, you will find there is a seemingly endless stream of requests from the marketplace for additional information, images, documentation on the products you sell. These may seem excessive and often unnecessary and you may instinctively blame Amazon directly for the inconvenience, but you should note that such requests are rooted in the regional laws from relevant governments, and it is the marketplace (Amazon) that has the duty to enforce them. Most often Amazon are not the source of such compliance requests, but they are responsible for the policing of product and business compliance on their platform, and ensuring sellers comply with the (relevant) laws of the land.  

Of the myriad EU laws/regulations affecting e-commerce sellers trading in the region, perhaps the most strongly felt is EU Regulation 2019/1020 (Market Surveillance and Compliance of Products) and GPSR, the General Product Safety Regulation. The latter is a new legislation and will supersede EU Regulation 2019/1020 for the most part, and we have explored the latter in great detail leading up to its implementation this year which you can learn more about in the webinars, help guides and other such content we have produced on the topic.  

Both these regulations certainly have the biggest drive behind product compliance requests and are why must sellers must now provide – and often clearly display –  virtually all forms of warning, safety and product usage information for their products on the listing, and also have certain information on the physical product.  

We will attempt to address here WHAT you need to provide, and HOW.   

HOW REQUESTS ARE RAISED 

Due to Amazon being a catalogue system, all kinds of requests for products are raised on a per item i.e. per ASIN basis. Whilst it would seem logical, they will never treat your inventory as a collective unit and allow you to address all products at once, meaning requests will be raised for individual ASINs at different times. Also, you can only submit information once a request is raised, so you are not able to get ahead of the game and independently submit info for any old product, you just have to be ready to react once called upon. 

Most likely an email will be sent to the accounts primary contact explaining that more information is required to continue to sell certain product(s), and specific instructions will be given on what to submit and how. This may also raise a support case in tandem, but not always.  

We would suggest that sellers do not rely solely on email notifications and should monitor the Manage Your Compliance dashboard within Seller Central, as any product compliance requests will reside here.  

Screenshot of Seller Central Account Health and ’Manage Your Compliance’ highlighted (above) 

As pictured, each one of your ASINs that has an outstanding request can be found here. If the number is 0, there are no products that need action. If the number was 3, there are 3 ASINs that need action and so on.   

  
REQUIRED ACTION 

GPSR WARNING & SAFETY IMAGE AND DOCUMENT REQUESTS 

For these new GPSR requests, sellers are required now to use the Seller Central image manager to submit all product warning and safety info.  

The main concern from sellers when they see these instructions is that Image Manager historically has been used to manage customer facing images on the PDP, and what is being requested likely isn’t optimal content for listing images. The image manager has several categories of images with specific file name format instructions so that these can be mapped to the correct destination. The instructions as pictured ask you upload in the ‘PT’ series of images, which will not appear on your listing images, instead mapping to the internal Amazon team to review.  

In spite of all this, GPSR has indeed brought in separate requirements as for what is required to be on the listing, which will include certain warning and safety info. You can be sure you are all covered here by reading the updated Amazon help guide on Product safety and compliance 

UPLOAD THROUGH COMPLIANCE MEDIA  

Amazon may also raise GPSR compliance requests for you to upload in the Compliance Media section. This relates to any product information that is not an image, e.g. User Manual, Spec Sheet, MSDS and other similar documents. 

Depending on the product and where you are selling, you may be required to have such media in multiple languages, and you can upload for each language as pictured below. 

Please note files must be in PDF format with max 10MB file size, so PDF compression may be required in certain cases.  

NON-GPSR COMPLIANCE REQUESTS (SINGLE AND BULK) 

As we know product compliance requests have been a thing long before GPSR came into effect, and these come with different instructions for submitting. For these, please refer to the Amazon help guide on Submit compliance documents or appeal a documentation request