EPR for online sellers: the complete guide

What is EPR?

EPR is the principle that whoever places a product on the market is responsible for what is left of it once it becomes waste. In practice that does not mean a bin behind your warehouse. It means money and data: you join an organisation that runs collection and recycling, you report how much you sold, and you pay a fee per kilogram or per unit.

Those organisations are called producer responsibility organisations, or PROs. For packaging, the PRO is Verpact in the Netherlands, Citeo in France and Fost Plus in Belgium. Germany works differently: you register in the public register LUCID and, separately, sign a contract with a so-called dual system. Each country is explained in its own country guide.

You will also see the term EPR compliance: it simply means meeting all of these obligations in every country you sell to.

When are you a producer?

The word producer is misleading. You do not have to make anything. For EPR, you are the producer when you are the first to place a product on a country's market. For online sellers that comes down to three situations:

• You sell under your own brand, even if a factory in China makes it.
• You import products from outside the country and sell them there.
• You sell at a distance to consumers in another country, through your own webshop or a marketplace. You are then the producer in the customer's country, even though the parcel leaves from yours.

That last point is where most sellers get caught out. A bol seller delivering to Belgium, or an Amazon seller using Pan-EU to sell in Germany, France and Italy, has separate obligations in each of those countries. What counts is where the customer receives the parcel, not where your stock sits.

Which product types fall under EPR?

Packaging applies to everyone who ships anything. The other product types apply only if you sell that kind of product:

How EPR works in practice

The details differ by country, but the rhythm is the same everywhere:

1. 1Register with the right organisation or register. You receive a registration number, which marketplaces ask you for. See how to get an EPR registration number.
2. 2Track how much you sell per country, and what each unit sold weighs in packaging or product, per material.
3. 3Report, usually once a year, sometimes quarterly or monthly: so many kilograms of paper, so many of plastic, so many appliances. See the deadlines per country.
4. 4Pay the fee the organisation calculates from your report.

Steps 1 and 4 are paperwork. Steps 2 and 3 are where the work is, because no marketplace gives you kilograms per country. You have to combine your sales data with weights per product. How to do that is in calculating packaging weight.

What changed in 2026

On 12 August 2026 the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR, Regulation (EU) 2025/40) started to apply. A regulation applies directly in every member state, so the ground rules for packaging EPR are now European. The main consequences for online sellers:

• You must be registered in every member state where you deliver packaged products to customers.
• Where you have no establishment in a country, the PPWR requires an authorised representative. That obligation is still being negotiated in Brussels.
• Germany replaced its Packaging Act (VerpackG) with the VerpackDG. LUCID stays.

Everything about the regulation is in the PPWR guide.

Marketplaces check your registration

For a long time, EPR was an obligation few people checked. That is over, because the law makes marketplaces themselves responsible. Amazon asks for your EPR numbers for Germany and France and can deactivate listings when they are missing. Kaufland asks for EPR numbers per country in its Seller Portal. bol may only let you sell in the Netherlands and Belgium if you meet the EPR rules there.

See what each platform asks for: Amazon and bol, Kaufland, ManoMano and Allegro.

Every scheme in one table

Per country and product type: which organisation you declare to, and when. This table comes from the same data the EPR screen in Channelsum uses. Where no fixed date has been confirmed, it says so rather than inventing a deadline.

Frequently asked questions