The New UK Product Safety Rules Are Coming. Here Is What Amazon Sellers Actually Need to Know.

Most sellers I speak to have heard of this one. They've seen it in a trade newsletter, maybe clicked through, skimmed the first paragraph, and filed it under "something to look at properly when things quieten down." The problem is that things don't quieten down, and this particular piece of legislation is not going to wait for you.

So here is a plain-English read of what the Product Regulation and Metrology Act 2025 actually means for UK brands importing physical goods and selling on Amazon or their own site. I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. What it is, is a founder-level look at which questions matter and what you should probably be doing about them.

What is the Act, and why should I care?

The Product Regulation and Metrology Act received royal assent in July 2025. It's described as the biggest overhaul of UK product safety law in decades, which is the kind of phrase that sounds like regulatory boilerplate until you read what it actually does.

The short version: it puts online marketplaces on the same legal footing as physical retailers, and it creates overlapping compliance obligations that sit on both the platform and the seller. That second part is the bit most people miss. Amazon having obligations doesn't reduce yours. If anything, the Act makes the seller's position in the supply chain more legally visible than it has been before.

The government published three linked consultations on the secondary legislation in March 2026. Those consultations closed in mid-2026 and secondary legislation is expected to follow, though no date is confirmed yet. So the rules haven't changed yet. That distinction matters, and I'll come back to it.

Does this apply to me if I sell through Amazon?

Yes. This is probably the most common misunderstanding I come across. Selling through a marketplace doesn't make you a passive participant in the supply chain. If you're importing physical goods into the UK, whether from China or anywhere else, you are likely to be classed as an importer under this framework. That brings obligations with it.

The Act explicitly extends compliance requirements beyond the marketplace to importers and distributors. If you're buying direct from a factory in Shenzhen and listing the product under your brand on Amazon UK, you are not a passive reseller. You're the importer. You're responsible.

What does the responsible person requirement actually mean?

This is where it gets a bit more involved. Under the proposed framework, physical goods sold in the UK need to have a named responsible person: a UK-based entity that can be contacted by enforcement authorities, that holds the documentation, and that takes accountability if something goes wrong.

For UK brands sourcing from China, you are often already playing this role, even if you haven't formalised it. What the Act does is make that expectation explicit and enforceable, rather than implied. The secondary legislation will set out exactly what documentation and due diligence is required, which is why the consultations matter and why watching this space over the next six to twelve months is genuinely worth doing.

If you're selling mostly DTC through your own Shopify site, this still applies to you. The Act doesn't distinguish much between channels.

How does this sit alongside compliance I'm already doing?

If you're already doing things properly, a lot of this shouldn't be new work. Safety testing, declarations of conformity, UKCA marking where it applies, keeping records of your supply chain: these are things a well-run importing brand should already have in some form.

What the Act does is raise the stakes for brands that have been a bit loose about this. "We've never had a problem" is not the same as "we're compliant." The enforcement tools being proposed include civil penalties alongside criminal prosecution, which is a meaningful expansion of the toolkit available to Trading Standards and similar bodies.

The new due diligence obligations on online marketplaces are also worth paying attention to, because Amazon is going to respond to its own obligations under this Act by tightening what it expects from sellers. That's an educated guess, not a certainty. But it's the kind of educated guess that tends to be right.

Who is most exposed here?

Brands that have scaled quickly, particularly on Amazon, without building out proper compliance documentation. Brands that treat safety testing as a one-off tick rather than an ongoing part of product development. Brands that import from multiple factories and don't have clean records of who made what, when, and to what standard.

The other group I'd flag is DTC-first brands that have recently expanded onto Amazon. They sometimes assume that Amazon's existing compliance processes cover them. They mostly don't, at least not for importer liability.

What should I actually do right now?

Three things, roughly in order.

• Get a compliance audit. Not a full legal review necessarily, but a clear picture of where your documentation currently stands: test reports, declarations, supply chain records, responsible person status. If you don't know what you have, find out.
• Watch the secondary legislation. The consultations have closed, and what comes next will set the actual implementation details. When the draft secondary legislation is published, that's when you need someone qualified reading it properly. Subscribe to something that will flag it for you, because it probably won't make the mainstream business press with much urgency.
• Don't wait for competitors to move first. The cost of being caught out when these rules are enforced will not be shared equally. Larger brands with compliance teams and legal budgets will absorb it. Smaller importing brands that haven't done the work will feel it much more acutely.

This is the kind of thing that looks like bureaucratic background noise right up until the point it isn't. Get it on your list before Q4 swallows everything, because January is a miserable time to be dealing with a compliance problem you could have seen coming.