Selling to the United States from Europe: the complete guide
One page for the whole procedure, from the American rule to the label you print on Tuesday morning.
Updated 11 October 2026 · 14 min read
What changed, and when
The obligation itself is not new. American law has required a certificate for certain consumer products for years, and European sellers have been producing them on request without much drama. What changed on 8 July 2026 is the moment: the data now has to be filed electronically before the goods enter, not produced afterwards if someone asks.
« Since 8 July 2026, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has imposed the prior electronic filing of certificates of compliance for imported consumer products subject to a safety standard. »That single displacement in time is what turned a paperwork question into a logistics question. A document you can produce next week is an administrative matter; a document that must exist before the parcel leaves is part of how you ship. Everything else in this guide follows from it.
The second thing that changed is who feels it. Before, the requirement mostly reached companies importing by container with a customs broker. Now it reaches the seller who posts twelve parcels a week, because the parcel is an import too, and nobody along that route was equipped to file anything.
Who is the importer, exactly
CPSC puts the duty on the importer, and defines that word rather than leaving it to habit.
« The importer is responsible for eFiling a certificate whenever one is required. »« is a party eligible to make entry for the merchandise pursuant to CBP statutes and regulations, who may be an owner, purchaser, consignee, or authorized customs broker. »Read that against a direct-to-consumer parcel and the practical situation is plain. There is no American business in the chain holding your test reports, so whoever is eligible to make entry, the only party who can produce the certificate data is you. That is why the question sellers ask - am I the importer? - matters less than the one that follows it: who else could possibly have this information?
One practical fear can be set aside straight away. Sellers assume the CPSC account needs an American customs number they will never have; CPSC's own page for importers says otherwise for an entity that is certifying without being the importer of record.
« If, however, the non-IOR owner, purchaser, or consignee is certifying the products, the entity does not need to provide an IOR number when creating business accounts. »Is your product actually covered
Not everything is. The rules that trigger a certificate are listed, and the list is finite: a rule either names your product or it does not. This is the step where most sellers either relax or discover a problem, and it costs nothing to establish.
« Below is a list of children's product safety rules that require third-party testing as well as the legal citation to be used on a Children's Product Certificate (CPC) »La Poste published its own reading of which categories are affected, and it is the fastest way to see whether you are in the room: children's products, household articles and candles, electronics, sports and leisure, fashion jewellery. It also says the list is not exhaustive, which is the honest caveat - the American rules are the authority, not the carrier's summary.
« This list is not exhaustive and may change at any time. »The guide for your trade goes through the rules that name it, one by one, with the citation each one puts on the certificate.
Which certificate, and who may test
There are two, and the difference is not a formality: it decides your cost and your lead time. A general certificate covers a product meant for everyone, and the testing behind it may come from any competent laboratory - including, in many cases, your manufacturer's own.
« Any laboratory—an in-house or an external, third party laboratory—can perform the testing required for non-children's products. »A children's product certificate is another matter. The rule requires testing by a laboratory CPSC has accepted, which means you cannot fall back on a supplier's internal report, and it is the single most common reason a launch slips by a month.
« Third party testing is required to support a certification of compliance to the rules (shown below) for children's products. »If the answer is that no rule applies at all, you do not write a certificate: the parcel carries a declaration instead, and that path is shorter than anyone expects.
The CPSC account, and registering a product
CPSC opened a registry where a certifier records the product once and gets identifiers back. It is not the only route - Colissimo accepts seven data elements per parcel from a sender who has not registered - but it is what turns a page of data into three short fields, and Etsy writes that for postal imports the Registry option is the required one.
« Self-registration is currently OPEN and accepting new participants. »Two warnings save time here. The account is not an ACE account and gives you nothing at customs by itself, and the identifiers describe a version of a product: change the supplier or the material and the entry needs a new version, not an edit.
« The user must create or generate a new Version ID, unique to the product, each time a certified product is updated. »What the parcel itself carries
This is where the abstraction meets the shipping table. With Colissimo, each parcel carries an annex loaded in the postage tool, and the content depends on whether the product is registered: three identifiers if it is, seven data elements if it is not.
« One CPSC annex form has to be loaded per parcel in your postage tool when preparing your shipment. »Two details trip up almost everyone the first time: the tracking number field stays empty, because the parcel does not have one yet when the annex is prepared, and the commercial description has to be written in English. A French description is a rejected annex, not a translated one.
« must be filled in English »Which route still works
The French postal answer is the part that keeps changing, and it is worth separating what is suspended from what is not. La Poste suspended its consumer offers to the United States, and writes that every European post has to adapt its declaration forms to the new American process - so this is not a French decision taken alone.
« all European postal operators are required to adapt their declaration forms to the new US customs process. »Professional offers are the exception, under conditions, which is why a shop with a contract can still ship when a private sender cannot. And CPSC has set 22 October 2026 as the date from which mail shipments are treated under the new arrangement - a date worth putting in your calendar rather than discovering.
« CPSC will require eFiled certificates for mail shipments, via a Full or Reference Message Set, beginning on October 22, 2026. »The mistakes that cost the most
The expensive ones are not exotic. First: treating a missing certificate as a form of exemption. Colissimo states the opposite in one line, and it is the sentence worth remembering above all the others.
« Missing information is interpreted as missing data, and not as an exemption »Second: assuming a parcel simply comes back. It may be held, and storage is charged while it waits, so an unresolved parcel gets more expensive rather than just late. Third: declaring a sale as a gift, which CPSC's own FAQ closes explicitly.
« Storage fees may then be applied by the US authorities, at 0.08 USD per kilogram and per working day of storage beyond five days of storage »The whole thing, in order
Written out, the procedure is shorter than the anxiety around it. What makes it feel long is that the steps are usually met out of order, one surprise at a time.
- Establish whether a rule names your product, and which one.
- Ask your manufacturer for what that rule requires, in writing - this is the step that takes days.
- Open the CPSC account while you wait for the reply.
- Issue the certificate, or the declaration when no rule applies.
- Register the product and keep the identifiers.
- Prepare the annex once, and complete it per parcel.
That is the sequence our questions walk through, in that order and without jargon, and it is free until there is something to produce. If your product turns out not to be regulated, you leave with a declaration and an annex and you will not have written a certificate at all.
And when a step is unclear, the assistant beside the questions answers with the official text in front of it rather than from memory. It is the same discipline as this page: everything above is quoted, dated, and linked to where it was published.