§3.5 Fulfilment Service Providers

Regulation (EU) 2019/1020 includes fulfilment service providers as another category of economic operators. Fulfilment service providers are any natural or legal person offering, in the course of a commercial activity, at least two of the following services: warehousing, packaging, addressing and dispatching, without having ownership of the products involved. The qualifying services do not include postal services (159), parcel delivery services (160) and any other postal or freight transport services. (161) Fulfilment service providers located in the EU are generally used to warehouse products offered by online operators to guarantee their swift delivery to EU consumers. These entities provide services to other economic operators. They store products and, further to the receipt of orders, they package the products and ship (dispatch) them to customers. Sometimes, they also deal with returns. There is a wide range of operating scenarios for delivering fulfilment services. Some offer all of the services listed above, while others only cover them partially. Their size and scale also differ, from global operators to micro businesses. The activities of fulfilment service providers go beyond those of parcel service providers that provide clearance services, sorting, transport and delivery of parcels. Fulfilment service providers are considered as economic operators under Regulation (EU) 2019/1020 and have to cooperate with market surveillance authorities in relation to the products they handle (162). Where the product falls within the scope of Article 4 of Regulation (EU) 2019/1020, the fulfilment service provider established in the Union becomes the economic operator under that Article 4 with respect to the products it handles, where there is no manufacturer, importer or authorised representative established in the Union and responsible for those products pursuant to Article 4 (1) of Regulation (EU) 2019/1020. Taking into account the variety of fulfilment service providers and the services they provide, the analysis of the economic model of some operators and the extent of their activities may conclude that they are also distributors, importers or authorised representatives.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-09-07