Authorised Representative vs. Distributor: Who Actually Carries Your EU Liability

A reseller moves your product. It does not move your legal exposure off your books.

Since 13 December 2024, the EU General Product Safety Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/988, has applied in full across every member state. It carries a quiet but decisive rule that many non-EU manufacturers have yet to feel in their structure. A consumer product cannot be placed on the EU market unless an economic operator established inside the Union is identifiable and responsible for it. For a manufacturer sitting in China, the Gulf, or anywhere outside the bloc, that responsibility does not transfer simply because a distributor buys the goods and resells them under its own commercial relationships.

The assumption that fails is a reasonable one. A manufacturer ships to a well-known European distributor, sees the product reach shelves, and concludes the compliance question has been answered by proximity. It has not. A distributor owes its own distinct duties under the framework, but it is not, by default and by silence, your Authorised Representative. Those are two different instruments doing two different jobs, and one of them is the one a regulator will ask about first.

An Authorised Representative is a named legal role brought into existence by a written mandate. It is a deliberate act. A specific operator, established in the Union, agrees in writing to hold defined responsibilities on the manufacturer's behalf, including keeping documentation available and cooperating with market surveillance authorities. A distributor buying your product is something else entirely. It is a commercial relationship, formed by purchase orders and margin, not by mandate. The first relationship answers the question of who carries the file. The second does not even ask it.

An EU Authorised Representative is a named legal role created by written mandate. A distributor buying your product is a commercial relationship. Confusing the two is how compliant manufacturers discover, too late, that no one was actually holding the file.

Without a written mandate naming a representative established in the Union, the chain of compliance has a hole in it that nobody notices while volumes are small and nothing has gone wrong. The hole becomes visible at the worst possible moment. The first market surveillance authority that opens a query and asks who is responsible here finds no clean answer. There is a manufacturer abroad, a distributor that owes lesser duties, and no operator who has formally accepted the manufacturer's obligations. In that gap, the product is the thing that waits at the border, and the manufacturer is the party whose European entry stalls while the structure is rebuilt under pressure.

What makes this worth attention is how avoidable it is. This is not a defect in the product or a flaw in the commercial logic of using a distributor. It is a structural omission, and structural omissions are cheap to prevent and expensive to discover. The mandate is a document. The decision to put it in place belongs at the moment the European route is designed, before the first container ships, not after the first inspection has already formed an impression of you that is difficult to reverse.

The fix, in other words, is not complicated. It is a question of getting the structure right at the start, with the right operator named in the right instrument, so that the answer to who is responsible here is already on file before anyone thinks to ask.