Methodology
What we count
Flagged Goods republishes two official sources and counts alerts naming the platform:
- EU Safety Gate: the European Commission's rapid alert system for dangerous non-food products. We include every alert published since December 2019, in English and German, and refresh daily. Each alert page links to the official notice.
- US CPSC: recalls published by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission since January 2020.
How a platform is identified
An alert counts for a platform only when the official record names that platform as a place of sale. We check, in this order:
- The official marketplace field. Some alerts list the online marketplace directly. It covers only some platforms (for example Amazon, AliExpress, eBay and Wish).
- The product identifier. For example "Sold on Temu (601…)".
- The official product description, but only in a sentence about the sale ("Product sold online, in particular via …"). If the platform's name is also the product's brand, the name must follow a word such as "via" or "on". A Shein-branded garment sold elsewhere does not count for Shein.
- For CPSC recalls, the "Sold at / Sold online at" list of sellers.
When none of those name a platform, three weaker signals are checked. Each is shown as its own method on the alert row:
- A marketplace item number in the record, in a format only that platform uses: an Amazon ASIN, a Temu or AliExpress item id, or a Shein SKU.
- An official photo's file name that names the platform, usually a screenshot of the listing (for example
Screenshot_…_Temu.jpg). - France's RappelConso recall register, when the alert links to a French recall that lists the platform among its distributors.
Every alert page shows which of these methods matched and quotes the text it matched.
What the numbers do not mean
- They are not a share of products. An alert is one product that a national authority acted on. The platforms sell millions of products, and almost all of them never appear in an alert.
- Many alerts name no seller. In the EU Safety Gate data, about half of all alerts have an unknown "sold online" status, and a quarter were sold in shops. Even among alerts marked as sold online, many do not say where; the year table on the home page shows how many. Authorities fill these fields unevenly, so a platform can be under-counted.
- Many removals never become alerts. Listings taken down under the Product Safety Pledge+ or after a Digital Services Act notice are usually removed without an alert being published.
- More alerts can mean more scrutiny. A platform that authorities test more often will be named more often.
Rates per 10 million users
Next to raw counts we show alerts per 10 million EU users. This measures regulatory attention, not risk. We use each platform's own figure for average monthly active recipients in the EU, which it must publish under Art. 24 of the Digital Services Act. Platforms measure users differently, so treat the rates as rough. We show a rate only when:
- we have checked the figure against the platform's own publication, and
- the platform has at least 30 EU Safety Gate alerts in the last 12 months.
Below that we mark the platform as a small sample. eBay publishes only "fewer than 45 million", so it gets no rate.
Categories, hazards and countries
Categories, hazards, measures and country of origin are taken as recorded by the notifying authority. CPSC recalls do not use the same categories, so we map them by keyword to the closest EU Safety Gate category. That mapping is approximate.
Why products are flagged
Each alert's reason ("live parts can be touched", "ingredient not allowed in cosmetics") is read from the English risk description the authority wrote, using fixed phrase rules rather than a statistical model, so every label can be traced to the wording in the official record. One alert can carry several reasons. The rules find a reason for about 94% of non-vehicle alerts; the rest describe something the rules do not cover and show no reason. Vehicle recalls get a single "vehicle defect" reason and are left out of the reason pages, as they are from product types. A reason is our reading of the record, not the authority's own classification: check the official notice before relying on it.
Languages
German pages use the Commission's own German text of each EU Safety Gate alert. US CPSC recalls exist only in English. Their German pages show the English original, marked as such, and are not machine-translated.
Reuse and independence
Source data is reused with attribution: © European Union for EU Safety Gate under the Commission's reuse policy, and U.S. government works for US CPSC. Flagged Goods is independent. It is not affiliated with the European Commission, the CPSC or any marketplace, takes no money from the platforms it counts, and uses no paid links.
Found a mistake? See Corrections.