Regulation (EU) 2019/1020 introduced the fulfilment service provider as a category of economic operator. Article 3(11) defines it as any natural or legal person offering, in the course of commercial activity, at least two of the following services: warehousing, packaging, addressing and dispatching, without having ownership of the products involved. Postal services, parcel delivery services and other postal or freight transport services are excluded. The General Product Safety Regulation repeats the definition in Article 3(12).
The category exists because of e-commerce. As the Commission’s Blue Guide explains, fulfilment centres in the EU are used to store products sold online by sellers established outside the Union and to ship them to consumers, so that no importer in the classic sense exists. Under Article 4(2)(d) of the Market Surveillance Regulation, a fulfilment service provider established in the EU becomes the economic operator responsible for the products it handles where no manufacturer, importer or authorised representative is established in the Union. It must then verify that the declaration of conformity and technical documentation exist, provide information to market surveillance authorities on request, inform them where a product presents a risk and cooperate on corrective action. Article 16 of the General Product Safety Regulation applies the same rule to consumer products.
Because the definition turns on the services actually offered, a logistics company should assess whether its business model also makes it a distributor or an importer. Under the 2024 Product Liability Directive the fulfilment service provider is liable for damage caused by a defective product from a non-EU manufacturer where there is no importer or authorised representative in the Union.