The GPSR came into law last December and while it has been slow to roll out Amazon and other marketplaces are – slowly, but surely – starting to ask sellers for proof of compliance.
For compliance on a product level one of the key things is product documentation. User manuals, assembly instructions and safety information must be available in the language of each market and uploaded to the correct section of every product listing. Amazon’s built-in translation tools help with product pages, but they don’t cover product instructions, which are more complex, technical and often updated over time.
StepAlong solves this problem. It lets you create and manage multilingual product instructions – including safety advice – in one place. Your instructions are automatically available online (with a QR code you can print onto packaging) in up to 32 languages. You can export compliant PDFs directly from StepAlong and upload them to Amazon, making GPSR compliance far simpler and faster.
The Challenge of Translating Product Manuals
Many sellers are already familiar with creating multilingual product listings. But the GPSR goes further than product titles and descriptions: it requires that all technical documentation (user manuals, installation guides, safety sheets) be translated.
The main issues brands face are:
- Scale: a catalogue of dozens of products can quickly turn into hundreds of manuals to translate.
- Cost: professional technical translations are expensive, especially when several languages are needed at once.
- Accuracy: a poor translation of instructions not only breaches regulations but can also lead to complaints or safety issues.
- Time: coordinating translators, checking formats and uploading documents to Amazon slows operations.
AI-Powered Translations for Manuals and Instructions
To solve this challenge, StepAlong has recently refined its AI translation engine specifically for user manuals, instructions and product tutorials. Unlike a generic translator or general AI model, it is tuned to handle technical texts while keeping their format and consistency.
Benefits of StepAlong Translations
- Context-aware translations: the AI understands the meaning of sentences in a manual and produces natural, precise results. You can also build glossaries with product-specific terms for each language.
- Simple process: on a single page (shareable with suppliers or partners) you can translate, review and publish the document.
- Format preserved: numbered steps, headings, warnings and original style are maintained.
- Multilingual SEO: generate language-specific URLs for online documentation, with impressive results — especially in less saturated languages.
- Scalability: available in 32 languages, including all those required by the GPSR in the EU.
How It Works in Practice
Imagine you want to sell an appliance in Germany, Italy and Poland. Amazon lets you reach these markets quickly, but under the GPSR you’ll need complete user manuals in German, Italian and Polish. With traditional methods, this would mean coordinating several translation providers and validating each document manually.
With StepAlong, once your manual is created you simply select the languages and, within minutes, get the translated version ready for review and download as a PDF to upload directly to Amazon.
Turning a Requirement into an Advantage
The GPSR adds an extra layer of demand to e-commerce in Europe. However, brands that adapt quickly gain a competitive edge: they inspire more trust, reduce the risk of penalties and can expand into new markets without friction.
Translation of manuals and instructions is no longer just a localisation task; it’s an essential part of regulatory compliance. Having a tool that does it quickly and accurately can be the difference between falling behind or scaling across several countries at once.
If you want to prepare your business for the GPSR, remove obstacles on major marketplaces like Amazon and save time ahead of the competition, get StepAlong today.
