Who carries the Digital Product Passport obligation?

Placing on the market is not making available

These two phrases look like synonyms. They are the load-bearing distinction in EU product law.

So duties attaching to placing on the market land on one actor rather than on everyone in the chain. A retailer selling a garment somebody else imported is making it available. It did not place it.

Selling online into the EU

An online offer counts as placing goods on the EU market when the offer is aimed at the EU. That is a test about intention shown through evidence rather than a test about whether a customer in Brussels can reach your checkout.

The signals that carry weight are the ones you chose: the dispatch areas you set, the languages you publish in, the currency you price in, the payment methods you accept and the domain you sell from. The signal that carries very little on its own is that the site loads in a browser somewhere in the Union. Every site does.

The same logic runs inside our own engine, in the other direction. A shop's shipping settings are never treated as evidence that it sells into a market, because ships is not sells and inferring a market from a postage table would attach duties to a business on the strength of a configuration screen.

The roles, and which one you are probably in

The framework recognises a small set of economic operator roles, and one company can occupy more than one of them at once for different products.

One more actor comes from product safety rather than from ecodesign. The General Product Safety Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/988, applies without any declaration of conformity and creates a responsible person established in the Union. We reached that provision, and the same instrument's provisions on listing information, through somebody else's reproduction rather than at the Official Journal, so neither is quoted here and neither carries a number. We record that the role exists. We do not model it, this page does not tell anybody who their responsible person is or how one is appointed, and nothing in the passport should be read as our assessment of who that person is for a given product.

If the role you occupy also sells at a distance

Settling which role you occupy does not settle how a passport has to be presented in the channel. Those are two jobs, and a single company can carry both. For the customer-facing layer, see what the online listing has to carry when a DPP applies. Selling at a distance can also bring in the GPSR responsible person, a separate role.

Which role do you occupy?

The map shows where the roles sit. This settles which one is yours. It is a way of identifying a role from your own documents, not a determination of one, and the answer belongs to a single product in a single market rather than to your company.

Take one product and one market, and answer in order. Stop at the first yes.

1. Does the product carry your name or trade mark, and did you have it designed or made? Then you are the manufacturer, whoever owned the machines. If it also enters the Union from outside and you are not established there, read on: somebody inside the Union still places it.
2. Are you established in the Union, and does the product arrive here from a third country through you? Then you are the importer for that product, and the duties attaching to placing land on you rather than on the brand that made it.
3. Have you been appointed in writing, by a manufacturer, to carry out specified tasks on its behalf? Then you are its authorised representative for exactly those tasks and no others. An arrangement that is not written down and scoped is not this role.
4. Do you supply the product onward in the course of business, without being the manufacturer or the importer? Then you are a distributor. Distributors carry real duties. They do not carry the manufacturer's.
5. Do you warehouse, pack, address or dispatch goods you never own? Then you are a fulfilment service provider, and the role exists so that goods sold into the Union by a seller outside it still have somebody reachable inside it.

Record the answer against the product and the market rather than against the business, with the named legal entity and the Member State it is established in beside it. The same company is routinely the manufacturer of its own line and the distributor of somebody else's, and those two facts are the first thing anybody checking the position asks for.

Why the role does not change when the act arrives

A role is fixed by how the product reaches the market: who has it made, under whose name it is sold, who brings it in, who supplies it onward. None of those facts is decided by the content of a future act. A delegated act settles what a passport must carry and for which products. It does not rearrange who is placing the product on the market.

So the role is the stable half and the duties attached to it are the unstable one. Establishing the role now means that when duties arrive they land on a question already answered rather than on an argument about which company you are.

That is the strength the framework supports and no more. It is not a claim that a future act cannot reach an actor this page does not describe, and it is not a reason to record a role once and never look again: the answer moves when the way a product reaches the market moves.

What a piece of software cannot be

An application can hold a field, render it, syndicate it and send it to a register. It cannot be the entity, and no configuration screen changes which company occupies a role.

Three separate pieces of first-party material behind this page say the same thing from three directions, and all three come from the vendors, not from us. A commerce platform states in its own help material that it doesn't offer the responsible person service. A marketplace refuses the role for its sellers and points them at paid providers. A merchant who asked a compliance vendor whether its feature amounted to the role was told the application only displays the fields.

We describe those three by class rather than by name. The evidence package behind this page supports the observation and does not support naming the companies, and a named platform beside a sentence about duties reads as a claim about that platform's obligations, which is not what any of this is. What the three of them establish together is narrow and useful: the software market's own documentation already agrees that software is not an actor.

On a proposal, ask which legal entity is named, in which Member State it is established and where that appointment is written down. If the answer is the name of a product rather than the name of a company, the role has not been filled by anybody, and a field in a database holding the word responsible is a field holding a word.

The importer carries the most and knows the least

When goods come from outside the Union, the operator established inside it that places them on the market is the importer, and the duties attaching to placing land there. That is the role with the widest gap between what it carries and what it can answer.

The importer did not specify the fabric, commission the tests or choose the mill. Its record of the goods is a commercial invoice, a packing list and whatever the seller wrote on them. The brand's record is better in every respect, and the brand may sit outside the Union, where that particular role does not reach it. The data and the duty end up in different companies, which is the asymmetry worth naming before anybody designs a process on top of it.

A brand outside the Union that wants to keep hold of the position has one written route, which is to appoint an authorised representative inside it, in writing and with a defined scope. That is a purchase rather than an arrangement. One very small merchant in the records behind this page priced outsourced representation at a provider's published annual fee and rejected it as uneconomic against its own turnover, and stayed with the position that whoever imports becomes the operator. The figure sits in the research record rather than on this page, because one provider's published price at one moment is not a market rate and publishing it as though it were would be the same error this estate spends its time correcting.

Either way somebody established inside the Union ends up holding the position. The only question the brand controls is whether that somebody is a company it chose.

Proving who that is, from outside

A passport names the operator carrying it. Corroborating that name against a public register works very differently depending on the Member State, and the unevenness is invisible until somebody tries.

The EU VAT number validation service discloses different amounts per Member State. A French number comes back with the company name attached. A German or a Spanish number comes back valid with the name and address rendered as dashes. A British number cannot be checked through it at all since the United Kingdom left, which we record as not checkable rather than as a failed check, because those are different findings.

Customs identifiers are harder still. Disclosure is consent based in both the EU and the UK, so no route binds a customs identifier to a company without the company agreeing to it. An engine that assumed otherwise would resolve identity in France and go quiet in Germany without ever reporting that it had.

None of that changes who carries the duty. It changes what anybody can prove about it from the outside.

A role name does not travel between regulations

DPP obligations, EUDR duties, textile EPR registration and repair obligations each define their own responsible actors. For example, EUDR has its own operator/trader definitions and a specific rule for a non-EU person placing relevant products on the market. Use the EUDR page for that test rather than reusing the DPP role result.

Operator and trader roles under EUDR are a different legal test. For which current EU product rule changes action now, use the EU Product Regulation Action Radar.

What the registry regulation puts on one operator

One instrument in force is unusually direct about where responsibility sits, and it is the implementing regulation behind the EU passport registry. It creates no duty for a textile business to register anything. What it does is decide which party answers for a registration once anybody makes one, and it does that in four separate provisions.

They are four rather than one, and merging any two of them is how this conversation goes wrong.

• A duty at the point of registration. One provision puts responsibility for the accuracy and the completeness of the registered data on the operator, at the moment the data is registered.
• A duty at all times. A separate provision asks that the registered data be accurate, complete and up to date at all times. It sets no interval, names no trigger and nominates no reviewer.
• A third party may do it, and the operator still answers for it. A further provision lets a third party verified in its own right register on a verified operator's behalf and leaves the operator fully responsible for what was registered (where passport data lives sets out the article).
• The operator is the controller of what it submits. A fourth provision makes the operator the controller of the data it submits, which is a status rather than a task and cannot be reassigned by a services agreement.

All four allocate responsibility between actors. They are not a procedure for running a passport, and none of them tells anybody inside a business who signs a value off. That is a different question with a different answer, and who owns a published field is where it is worked through, including what happens when a published value turns out to be wrong. What the act of registering involves, and what a business has to be before the registry will accept anything from it at all, is set out in what registering asks of a business.

Read together the four make one commercial point. A supplier can carry the work and cannot carry the position, so an arrangement described as taking compliance off your hands is an arrangement about labour, and no sentence in the instrument moves the responsibility along with it.

Is there an exemption if you are small?

We have not found one, and our reading of the framework is that its approach to small and micro enterprises is support rather than exemption.

Three provisions carry that: a guidance and support provision aimed at smaller enterprises, a provision making the circumstances of small enterprises an input into when requirements begin to apply, and a carve-out for the smallest. On that reading a brand of three people selling into the EU sits in the same place as a brand of three thousand, with more help available and the same obligations.

The burden that in practice falls hardest on a small brand is not a passport duty at all. It is producer registration for extended producer responsibility, which is live in some markets today, is unrelated to whether a passport exists, and costs roughly the same per market whatever the volume behind it.

What is not settled

Four things, kept visible rather than tidied away. Where we say something is unsettled we mean a specific thing about our own work, and how we decide that separates the three kinds of absence that sentence can carry.

Northern Ireland and the wider EEA

We have not settled how our own applicability logic should treat either. The consequence is deliberate. Where the position is undecided the duty stays live rather than switching off, so nobody is told a duty does not reach them on the strength of a question we have not answered. The separate question of what a business selling in Britain faces has its own answer, in what the UK position actually is.

Who counts as a supplier of an article for substance notifications

Whether a brand owner that never physically handles goods is the supplier of an article under REACH is not obvious from the text. We treat it as carrying the duty and we label that as our reading. It matters for the substance notification reference on the passport and nowhere else.

Whether ordinary apparel needs a declaration of conformity

Our reading is that it does not, and we have not had that reading tested by anybody else. Declarations belong to specific regimes such as personal protective equipment, medical devices, toys and electrical equipment. Ordinary clothing falls outside all of them. That is our reading of the instruments rather than a statement any of them makes, and it is the reason there is no public register of textile test reports to consult.

What the textile act will say about actors

Unknown, because it does not exist. Any page telling you today which actor carries a textile passport duty is describing the framework and calling it the product rules. Separately from the passport duty, the registrations that gate a listing today attach to the company rather than the product, and they have their own lifecycle.

When any of this starts

This page carries no date, and the omission is deliberate. Adoption, entry into force, application and any transition period are four different things, and the status page is the only page here that states dates, row by row, with what is in force kept separate from what has been adopted and from what has only been signalled.

Sources

No article number appears on this page because no single one answers the question. The obligation sits on a role, the role is defined in one instrument and used differently in the next, and which act puts the passport duty on a particular operator depends on the product group. So the page reads the architecture across the instruments below rather than quoting one provision and letting it stand for all of them. Where a specific provision is doing the work, it is named beside the source it comes from.

• Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, consolidated text
  EU lawRelevant provisions reviewed

  Article 2 for the definitions of manufacturer, importer, distributor, authorised representative, fulfilment service provider and placing on the market, and for the distinction between placing on the market and making available. Read for how the framework confers the passport duty rather than for a requirement it sets by itself, which is what the product-specific act does.

• Regulation (EU) 2019/1020 on market surveillance and compliance of products
  EU lawRelevant provisions reviewed

  Article 4 for the tasks that fall on an economic operator established in the Union, and Article 3 for the definitions the role names on this page are read against. This is where the shape of the role architecture comes from.

• Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778 establishing the Digital Product Passport Registry
  Delegated or implementing actRelevant provisions reviewed

  What the Registry puts on one named operator, and the registration obligation itself. It does not decide which role that operator occupies under the product act.

• General Product Safety Regulation (EU) 2023/988
  EU lawRelevant provisions reviewed

  One proposition only: that a role name does not travel unchanged between regulations. Its own definitions are read against the ecodesign framework's, not merged with them.