7 in 10 Amazon Brands Selling in the EU Still Have Active Compliance Issues, According to New Analysis

A new research report from Northern European marketplace agency INNELS — based on more than 100 structured client conversations across 90+ brands — identifies EU compliance as the single most prevalent operational pain in the European Amazon ecosystem. INNELS is releasing the full report and a free diagnostic tool today.

Copenhagen, Denmark, 2026-06-03 — /EPR Network/ — Approximately seven out of ten Amazon brands selling into the European Union are running with at least one active compliance issue at any given moment — and most of them don’t realise it until Amazon suppresses a listing.

That figure is the headline finding of a new research report published today by INNELS, a leading Northern European Amazon and TikTok Shop agency based in Copenhagen. The report — Compliance Issues Affect Approximately 70% of Amazon Brands Selling in the European Union at Any Given Time — is based on a structured review of more than 100 client conversations across the agency’s active portfolio of 90+ brands selling into Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The analysis identified compliance — defined to include listing suppressions, regulatory documentation, barcode and traceability requirements, packaging registrations, language localization, and marketplace-specific authorization processes — as the single most common operational issue in the dataset. It appeared in approximately 70% of active client portfolios, more frequently than PPC efficiency (~62%), inventory coordination (~54%), buy-box loss (~38%), or any other category measured.

Alongside the report, INNELS is launching a free EU Compliance Audit tool — available at their website — that gives Amazon sellers a country-by-country compliance report in under two minutes, with no credit card and no account required.

The structural invisibility problem

The report’s central argument is that EU compliance is not simply common — it is structurally hidden until enforcement surfaces it. Unlike PPC inefficiency or inventory misalignment, which appear in standard operational dashboards, compliance failures most often become visible only after Amazon has already removed a listing.

The European Union, the report notes, is the second-largest Amazon market in the world, with an estimated $152 billion in third-party gross merchandise volume flowing through it annually. But for sellers, it is not one market — it is twenty-seven, each with its own compliance regime.

The General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) came into force on 13 December 2024, introducing stricter requirements for non-food consumer products sold across all EU member states. Among other rules, the GPSR requires every non-EU manufacturer to appoint an EU-based Responsible Person whose name and contact details must appear on the product packaging itself. More than a year on, enforcement is no longer theoretical: Amazon now actively removes listings without proper Responsible Person designation, missing safety documentation, or non-compliant labelling.

But GPSR is only one of several frameworks brands must navigate. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) registrations are required separately in each country, with country-specific scheme operators (LUCID in Germany, CITEO in France, among others). Cosmetics products must be notified through the EU Cosmetic Product Notification Portal (CPNP) on a per-SKU basis. Products containing batteries trigger entirely separate registrations (BattG in Germany, Corepile in France). Listings sold in Germany must carry German-language copy and Warnhinweise — Amazon DE buyers actively filter out English-only listings. Category-specific frameworks add further requirements for food supplements, electronics, toys, and other regulated product types.

The report concludes that most US- and UK-based Amazon operating models were not designed for this layer of complexity, producing a recurring failure mode in which brands fix one compliance issue while remaining unaware of others — until enforcement surfaces them, often during high-volume commercial windows.

What the tool does

The EU Compliance Audit accepts a live Amazon listing URL and a handful of product details — category, target marketplaces, packaging materials, ingredient list where relevant, country of manufacture, and company location. In under two minutes, it returns a country-by-country compliance scorecard, a prioritized punch list of blockers and risks, an estimated timeline to compliant launch, and an estimated cost range — delivered both on-screen and by email.

The tool runs against current regulatory frameworks (GPSR, EPR, CPNP, country-specific rules) rather than against a generic checklist. It is free, requires no account, and is designed to be useful regardless of whether the user engages INNELS for follow-up implementation.

Quotes from the founders

“Compliance is the number-one stopover for Amazon brands trying to expand to EU,” said Mark Daniel Zalomajev, Co-Founder and CEO of INNELS. “Europe is too fragmented — every market has its own regulation, every category has its own rule, and most US and UK Amazon playbooks simply don’t translate. We see this in the calls we run every week: nearly seven out of ten first-time clients raise compliance as their main pain point. We built this tool so brands can get a working answer in two minutes, instead of paying a consultant for the same diagnostic.”

“We see too many brands discover they have a compliance problem only after Amazon tells them,” added Andrejs Klimovskis, Co-Founder of INNELS. “By that point the listing is already suppressed, the appeal cycle has started, and every failed appeal makes the next one harder. One of our enterprise clients lost over €500,000 in Q4 last year because a single listing in Germany was silently suppressed during peak season, with no clear explanation visible in their compliance dashboard. The point of this audit is to catch that exact gap — quietly, before it costs you a Christmas.”

Availability

The full research report — Compliance Issues Affect Approximately 70% of Amazon Brands Selling in the European Union at Any Given Time — is available for free download at 

https://www.innels.com/research 

The free EU Compliance Audit tool is available at https://check.innels.com/compliance-checker/   

About INNELS

INNELS is a Copenhagen-based, full-service marketplace growth agency working with Amazon and TikTok Shop brands across Europe. Founded in 2018 by Mark Daniel Zalomajev and Andrejs Klimovskis, the agency has worked with more than 90 brands over the last eight years and operates a 16-person team across Europe. INNELS generated over €10 million in revenue for its Amazon EU clients in 2025, and works on a commission-based model.