Market surveillance authorities across Europe screened nearly 1,700 online listings this summer, and the product safety sweep published this week delivered a rare piece of encouraging enforcement news. Ninety-one percent of the marketplaces checked had registered on the Safety Gate Portal and named a point of contact for national authorities. A year earlier the figure stood at 53 percent.
The exercise ran from May to July 2026 and covered childcare articles and gym equipment offered across 35 marketplaces. Inspectors were not testing whether the goods were dangerous. They tested whether the listings carried what the General Product Safety Regulation demands: a responsible person established in the EU, working contact details, and the marketplace’s own registration with the authorities who might one day order a takedown.
Those requirements sound bureaucratic, and they constitute the entire enforcement mechanism. A regulator who cannot identify who placed a product on the EU market cannot recall it, fine anyone, or intercept the next shipment. The 38-point jump in registration therefore measures something concrete: the share of listings where enforcement has become technically possible at all.
National authorities still issued 560 orders to marketplaces over non-compliant listings. That number sits awkwardly beside the headline. A substantial share of checked offers failed on information duties even as marketplace-level registration approached universality, which suggests platforms have complied at the corporate level while individual sellers on those platforms have not. Compliance by the landlord is not compliance by the tenants.
The results arrived as Brussels hosts International Product Safety Week from 7 to 10 September, drawing between 400 and 600 participants for a twentieth edition themed ‘Product Safety in Motion’. Publishing enforcement statistics during the week regulators from outside Europe attend is a deliberate choice. It exports the EU rulebook by demonstration rather than by negotiation, which has become the Commission’s preferred method since the trade climate turned.
The General Product Safety Regulation has applied since December 2024, replacing a 2001 directive drafted before online marketplaces existed. Its central move treats the marketplace as an actor carrying obligations rather than a neutral venue. Commission rules require platforms to act on Safety Gate notifications, maintain a single registered contact point, and ensure recall notices reach the consumers who actually bought the item.
That final duty remains the weakest link. A rule requiring direct notification only functions if the marketplace holds usable purchase records and passes them along, and recall response rates in Europe have historically been poor. The sweep measured none of this, and no comparable EU-wide figure exists to measure it against.
Two structural gaps survive the improvement. Sellers based outside the EU can still list through platforms under no obligation to verify the identity of the responsible person they name. Goods shipped directly to consumers from third countries frequently reach doorsteps without passing the checks applied to commercial imports. Registration statistics say nothing about either problem.
Authorities have promised continued monitoring and enforcement where needed. The more revealing test comes next year. Did the 560 orders issued this summer produce listings that actually disappeared, and will the marketplaces that registered in 2026 still answer their contact points in 2027? Registration is a form filled in. Enforcement is what happens afterwards.
