GPSR penalties and fines

Article 44, word for word

1. Member States shall lay down the rules on penalties applicable to infringements of this Regulation that impose obligations on economic operators and providers of online marketplaces and shall take all measures necessary to ensure that they are implemented in accordance with national law. 2. The penalties provided for shall be effective, proportionate and dissuasive. 3. The Member States shall, by 13 December 2024, notify the Commission of those rules and of those measures, where they have not previously been notified, and shall notify it, without delay, of any subsequent amendment affecting them.

GPSR sets no EU-wide fine amount or range. Article 44 delegates penalty-setting entirely to each of the 27 Member States, subject only to the "effective, proportionate and dissuasive" standard, the same formula used elsewhere in EU law for delegated penalties. Any specific euro figure for "the GPSR fine" has to be sourced to a specific country's national law, not to the regulation itself.

Germany's fine tiers, the one sourced example

Germany implements Article 44 through its existing product-safety statute, the Produktsicherheitsgesetz (ProdSG), Section 28.

The two-working-day marketplace takedown deadline is not a fine

Providers of online marketplaces shall take the necessary measures to receive and process orders issued pursuant to this paragraph and they shall act without undue delay, and in any event within two working days from receipt of the order.

This two-working-day figure is a marketplace's deadline to act on a market surveillance authority's order about a specific dangerous-product listing. It is not a fine, and it is not the deadline for reporting an accident.

The manufacturer shall ensure that, through the Safety Business Gateway, an accident caused by a product placed or made available on the market is notified, without undue delay from the moment it knows about the accident, to the competent authorities of the Member State where the accident has occurred.

"Without undue delay" is the actual standard for accident notification. There is a separate three-working-day figure elsewhere in Article 22, for a marketplace processing a product-safety notice received under the Digital Services Act, which is also distinct from both of the above.

The enforcement path in practice

A market surveillance authority can order a marketplace to remove a specific dangerous-product listing (two working days to act), require the marketplace to process third-party safety notices (three working days), and require marketplaces to suspend traders who repeatedly offer non-compliant products after a prior warning. Separately, and in parallel, each Member State runs its own Article 44 penalty regime, which is where an actual fine amount, like Germany's, comes from.