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What Australian online sellers must do when a product they sell is recalled

If you sell physical products online in Australia — on Shopify, Amazon, eBay, or your own store — there’s a quiet risk sitting in your catalogue right now: one of your products could be recalled this fortnight, and you might be the last to know.

Recalls don’t come with a knock on your door. They’re published to a government register, and the obligation to keep selling safe products sits with you, not the regulator. Here’s what actually happens, what you’re expected to do, and a checklist for when it’s one of your lines.

First — how would you even find out?

In Australia, consumer product recalls are published by the ACCC on Product Safety Australia. New recalls are added continuously — toys with button-battery hazards, prams that fail safety standards, electrical goods that overheat, and more.

The catch: nobody emails sellers when a product they happen to stock gets recalled. Unless you’re manually searching that register against every SKU you carry — by brand, model, and barcode — a recall can be live for weeks before you notice. By then you may have kept selling a product that’s been pulled from the market.

What you’re expected to do

Your obligations depend on whether you’re the supplier who initiated the recall or a retailer reselling someone else’s product, but the practical expectations for an online seller are consistent:

• Stop selling the recalled product immediately and remove the listing.
• Follow the supplier’s remedy — usually refund, replacement, or repair — and pass recall information to customers who bought it where you can.
• Keep records of what you sold and how you responded. If a question ever comes up, “we checked and acted” is a very different position to “we didn’t know.”

There’s also a reporting duty worth knowing: under the Australian Consumer Law, a supplier of consumer goods must notify the ACCC within two days of becoming aware that a product they supplied is associated with a death, or a serious injury or illness. The exact wording and how it applies to your business is something to confirm with the official guidance at productsafety.gov.au or a professional — but the direction is clear: safety issues are time-sensitive and reportable.

A practical checklist

1. Confirm the match against the official notice on productsafety.gov.au (model number and barcode, not just product name).
2. Pause or delete the listing across every channel you sell on.
3. Quarantine remaining stock so it can’t be picked or shipped.
4. Note the recall reference (PRA number), the hazard, and the supplier’s remedy.
5. Contact affected customers with the remedy where you have their details.
6. Keep a dated record of the match and the actions you took.

The hard part isn’t the response — it’s noticing

Most sellers can handle the checklist above. What trips people up is the first step: knowing a recall happened at all. The register is public, but checking it by hand — product by product, every couple of weeks, forever — is the kind of task that quietly never gets done. And a recall you didn’t notice is indistinguishable, to a customer or a regulator, from one you ignored.

RecallSiren is a notification tool that cross-references your catalogue against the ACCC Product Safety recall register. It is not legal or compliance advice, does not guarantee every relevant recall will be matched, and is not affiliated with the ACCC. Always confirm against the official notice at productsafety.gov.au and seek professional advice for your specific obligations.

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