What the CPSC is, and why it now concerns you
Nothing about your product changed this year. What changed is when the paperwork has to exist.
Updated 11 October 2026 · 6 min read
An agency, not a customs service
The Consumer Product Safety Commission is a federal agency. It does not collect duty and it does not run the border - that is US Customs and Border Protection. It writes safety rules for consumer products, and it can have a product recalled or seized when those rules are not met.
« CPSC works to save lives and keep families safe by reducing the unreasonable risk of injuries associated with consumer products »Its tools are blunt: it issues mandatory standards, bans products when no standard would do, and organises recalls. A French seller meets it at exactly one point - when a parcel enters the United States.
« Issuing and enforcing mandatory standards or banning consumer products if no feasible standard would adequately protect the public; »What a certificate actually is
A CPSC certificate is not a label, a badge or a test report. It is a statement, signed by whoever certifies, that names the product, the rules it was certified to, who made it and where, when it was last tested and by which laboratory. Two kinds exist: a Children's Product Certificate for products designed for children, and a General Certificate of Conformity for the rest.
« Children's products require a Children's Product Certificate (CPC) »The difference between the two is not paperwork, it is who may test. A children's product has to be tested by a laboratory CPSC has accepted; a general-use product can be tested by any laboratory, including the manufacturer's own, as long as the certificate rests on a real test or a reasonable testing programme.
« Children's products must be tested by a CPSC-accepted laboratory »What it is not
Three confusions cost sellers the most time. The CPSC is not a tariff: nothing it asks for is a tax, and a certificate does not reduce or increase what your customer pays. It does not test products itself: laboratories do that, and for a children's product the laboratory has to be one CPSC has accepted. And it does not issue certificates: you write yours, you sign it, and you carry the consequences of what it says.
« The GCC must be based on a test of each product or a reasonable testing program. »The last one is the hard part for a small shop, because it means nobody can bless your product for you. What can be done for you is everything else: knowing which rules name your kind of product, collecting the facts a certificate has to state, and putting them in the form the American system expects.
What changed on 8 July 2026
Certificates have been required since 2008. What changed this year is that they must be filed as data, electronically, before the goods arrive - rather than kept in a drawer and produced if someone asks.
« Previously, importers only needed to make them available upon request. »« Since 8 July 2026, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has required the prior electronic filing of certificates of compliance for imported consumer products subject to a safety standard. »That single change is what pulled small European sellers into a regime written for importers. A parcel worth forty euros and a container both enter the United States through the same door, and the door now asks for the same data.
What you will be asked for, concretely
Behind the vocabulary there are seven facts, and they are the same seven whether you are a factory in Shenzhen or a ceramicist in Vallauris. The product and its identifier. The rules certified to. Who certifies, with an address that can be written to. Who keeps the test records. Where and when it was made. When it was last tested, and by whom. And the attestation itself.
« Full PGA Message Set: The importer provides their broker with the seven required product certificate data elements for the imported product and the broker files it in the CPSC PGA Message Set. »There is a shorter road. Register the product once in CPSC's Product Registry and the parcel carries three identifiers instead of seven blocks of data - which is why Colissimo advises regular shippers to register, and why the whole journey here ends there.
« Reference PGA Message Set: The importer pre-enters the product certificate data into the CPSC Product Registry and then provides their broker with the Certificate Identifiers to be filed in the PGA Message Set. »Who signs, when you are the seller in France
The certificate is signed by the certifier, and for imported goods that is the importer rather than the factory. When a French shop sells directly to an American customer, the shop is the one who knows the product, holds the test reports and can state the facts - so in practice the shop certifies, and the data travels with the parcel.
« 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. »One open question remains, and we would rather name it than paper over it: CPSC's texts do not say whether a seller established outside the United States needs an importer number of their own. We have asked; until there is an answer, the journey says so on the step where it matters.
Where CertSeven fits
CertSeven asks a few questions about what you sell, tells you which of CPSC's lists name that kind of product, and shows the official text behind each answer. That part is free and needs no account.
If documents are needed, it writes them with you: the certificate as a PDF, the Product Registry sheet field by field, and the CPSC annex to attach to each parcel. It files nothing on your behalf - nobody can - and it never decides that a rule applies to your product, because that judgement belongs to whoever signs.