Do I become the responsible person myself if I act as a fulfilment service provider?

Fulfilment becomes responsibility only when no one else remains

A fulfilment service provider becomes the responsible person at the moment when no manufacturer, importer or authorised representative in the EU can be identified, or when none of them responds or is reachable. As long as those earlier links in the chain do exist and can be found, the fulfilment service provider remains simply a fulfilment service provider: a party that provides storage, packaging, addressing or shipping without owning the product, with the corresponding, more limited set of obligations.

The role of fulfilment service provider stands namely at the end of a hierarchy. First the EU manufacturer is responsible, then the importer, then the authorised representative, and only if none of those three can be identified does that responsibility fall to the fulfilment service provider. This makes the position in practice vulnerable: whoever ships parcels for a seller outside the EU who does not respond to requests, or from whom contact details no longer work, cannot claim "I am only logistics" — there must be a responsible person, and failing better, that becomes the last link that is still identifiable. This is separate from the own-brand rule: whoever sells products themselves under their own name or logo is deemed a manufacturer anyway, even if that party also carries out fulfilment work for others. A distributor — who merely resells a product without this intermediary function — does not appear in this cascade and is therefore never automatically made a responsible person.

Where this follows from: Article 16 and Article 3

Article 16 of Regulation (EU) 2023/988 describes the cascade of market participants who act as the responsible person, with the fulfilment service provider last in line when manufacturer, importer and authorised representative are absent or unreachable. Article 3 of the same regulation defines what is meant by a fulfilment service provider: a party that provides services such as storage, packaging, addressing or shipping without becoming the owner of the products.