A clean shipping term can hand a quiet legal role to the one party you least want holding it.
Selling FOB looks like the simplest arrangement in the world. The goods leave your factory, cross the rail of the vessel at the port of origin, and from that point the risk and the freight belong to the buyer. For a manufacturer in China, it is the term that keeps the deal lean and the responsibilities short. What it does not do, and what too many manufacturers never examine, is decide who becomes the EU importer when those goods reach Europe.
Under EU product law, the importer is not a courtesy title. It is a defined economic operator with real obligations: ensuring the manufacturer has carried out conformity assessment, that the technical documentation exists, that the product carries the right markings, and that the operator's own name and address appear on the product or its packaging. When you sell FOB and your European buyer takes the goods across the Union border, that buyer becomes the importer by operation of law, whether or not either side intended it.
This is where the term turns against you. The party now carrying importer duties is often a distributor or end customer who never planned to police your compliance file and has no commercial reason to defend your product if a market surveillance authority comes asking. They inherited a legal role through a shipping term in a contract nobody read closely. And because the General Product Safety Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/988, has applied in full since 13 December 2024, the requirement that a responsible economic operator sit inside the Union is no longer a future concern. It is the present condition of selling at all.
A shipping term should move your goods, not quietly appoint your buyer as the keeper of your compliance file.
The trap has a second edge. When your buyer becomes the importer, the relationship reorders itself. They now hold leverage you handed them for free, and they carry exposure you never disclosed. If an inspection goes badly, the cost and the reputational damage land on a partner who did not sign up for it. That is not how a first order becomes a second one. It is how a promising channel sours into a dispute over who was supposed to hold the file.
The alternative is not to abandon FOB. It is to decide, deliberately and in writing, who carries the importer and responsible-operator role before the contract is signed. Sometimes that is the buyer, properly briefed and compensated for the duty. Sometimes it is an authorised representative you appoint, keeping the compliance role under your own control rather than scattering it across whichever party happens to clear customs. Either way, the choice should be made by you, not discovered later in an Incoterm.
For a non-EU manufacturer, the question is plain. When your goods enter the Union, who is the importer, and do they know they are. If the honest answer is "whoever bought them," the structure is open in a way that will cost you at the worst possible moment. That is worth closing before the next container ships.