This article is written for operations, product data and compliance leads at brands selling into the US and EU, and is worth forwarding to finance, ecommerce and whoever manages your customs broker.
A range can be signed off and booked into the warehouse with a launch date agreed, and still be unsellable in a market. What usually stops it is proof that the product is what you say it is and that a named legal entity is responsible for it. That proof has to survive the trip through every system between the product record and the customs entry.
Tariff codes don’t tell you what testing applies
Take one apparel SKU going into the US and the EU.
In the US, Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) eFiling became mandatory for most imports on 8 July 2026. Certificate of compliance data now goes electronically to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as part of the import entry. The rule adds no new testing. It changes how certificate data you should already hold reaches CBP.
CPSC publishes a list of US tariff codes it expects to flag for eFiling and says plainly that the list isn’t exhaustive. If a product is regulated, the obligation applies whether or not its code appears.
Children’s sleepwear is the clearest example.
The tariff schedule has headings for pyjamas and nightdresses, but none of them tells you whether a garment counts as children’s sleepwear under US safety rules.
Whether it counts depends on what the garment is intended for and the size range it’s sold in.
General clothing only has to meet the basic US flammability standard (16 CFR 1610).
Children’s sleepwear has to meet much stricter flammability standards, under 16 CFR 1615 for sizes 0 to 6X or 1616 for sizes 7 to 14.
Garments for babies aged nine months and under are exempt from the stricter tests, as are tight-fitting styles that meet set measurements. They still have to meet the general clothing standard.
Merchandising and product need to agree intended use and age range with compliance before anyone picks a tariff code, because that decision sets which tests apply.
In the EU, the listing is the sticking point
The EU’s General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) has applied since 13 December 2024. For anything sold online, the listing has to identify the product and the manufacturer, with contact details. Where the manufacturer sits outside the EU, the listing also needs an EU responsible person, an EU-based business that takes on safety duties for the manufacturer. Any warnings have to be in a language shoppers in that market can understand.
So whether a SKU can be sold in Germany is now partly a product-record and localisation question. Physically compliant goods can still be held up by a listing that’s missing one of those fields.
French EPR is more than one number
France adds category-specific extended producer responsibility (EPR). Products in the textiles and footwear category need registration and volume declarations, with eco-contributions (a per-unit fee) paid on what you declare. Packaging is a separate obligation.
A brand can be obligated for apparel and packaging at the same time. Which entity holds each obligation depends on who is actually placing that category on the French market, and with DTC running alongside wholesale that isn’t always the same entity.
The new EU guarantee rules need two different owners
Since 27 September 2026, two EU requirements apply that look alike on a Jira board.
The first is the harmonised legal guarantee notice, a standard EU notice telling consumers about their legal right to a minimum two-year guarantee. An ecommerce site can meet it with a general notice on the site, which makes it a site-level change with legal sign-off and localisation behind it.
The second is the GARAN label, the EU’s harmonised label for a producer’s voluntary guarantee that a product will keep working for a stated period. It only applies when that guarantee is free and covers the whole product for more than two years, and the standard two-year legal guarantee doesn’t qualify. Where it does apply, it becomes product-level work. The producer supplies the guarantee information and the seller displays the label in a fixed design, which has to show the guarantee duration alongside the brand and model identifier.
Not everything is a product passport
Plenty of teams use DPP as shorthand for any EU rule that touches product data. The product identifiers GPSR requires on listings today are a separate thing from a textile Digital Product Passport, a digital record of a product’s composition and sustainability data that the EU is introducing category by category under its ecodesign rules. The Commission is still drafting the detailed rules for textiles, so there’s little sense building batch-level complexity around a guess.
That isn’t a reason to ignore what’s already live. Stable model identifiers linked to their evidence, plus a named owner for each market role, help with GPSR and US certificates now and will make any future passport easier to meet.
Customs refunds don’t arrive on their own
In February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) doesn’t authorise tariffs. CBP stopped collecting those duties from 24 February, and on 20 April opened a refund module in its ACE (Automated Commercial Environment) system, called CAPE (Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries).
The money goes to the importer of record, the party legally responsible for the entry and its duties, or to a third party the importer authorises on CBP Form 4811. It also needs ACH (the US bank transfer network) refund enrolment in ACE, and an ACH setup used only for paying duty doesn’t count. CBP’s own reporting lists refunds rejected for missing ACH enrolment.
If you sell through a merchant of record (the business legally selling to your customer) or use a third-party importer, CBP still pays the importer of record or their designee. Your contract decides who is commercially entitled to the cash, so it’s worth checking before the refund arrives.
First sale is a paperwork programme
First-sale valuation gets talked about like a setting you switch on in a spreadsheet.
It lets you declare customs value on an earlier sale in the chain, typically factory to middleman, instead of the later sale to the US importer. It only holds if you can evidence a genuine sale clearly destined for the US and made at arm’s length (on normal commercial terms).
Without that evidence there’s no saving, and doing it properly means every team touching the supply chain agreeing with your broker on what gets documented and where it’s kept.
The asset is the line between product and proof
The thing worth building is a traceable line connecting the physical product and the legal entity to the evidence and to each channel’s product record. Without it, SKUs keep turning up ready to ship but not ready to list, or imported under one entity and refunded to another.
Trace one SKU from the product brief to the customs entry and look for the hand-off where a system assumes an answer nobody has signed off. The rules will keep changing, and a business that can answer these questions from its own data spends less time and money each time one of them becomes a new field.