PrestaShop and EPR: How to Manage Packaging Compliance in Europe

PrestaShop powers millions of online stores in France, Spain, Italy, Poland, and across the EU. It's the platform of choice for many European e-commerce brands — and it's exactly the segment where the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) will hit hardest.

From August 2026, any company placing packaged products on the EU market must register with the relevant national Producer Responsibility Organisation (PRO), declare the materials and weight of their packaging each quarter or year, and pay end-of-life fees. PrestaShop ships with none of that built in. Here's how to close the gap.

What PrestaShop gives you — and what it doesn't

PrestaShop records every order: the products sold, the quantities, the delivery country, the order value. That's exactly the sales data you need for EPR declarations. It's already there.

What PrestaShop has no concept of is packaging data: how much cardboard, plastic, glass, or metal is in each product's packaging, at what level (primary, secondary, or shipping), and what those materials weigh. That data lives in your product specs, supplier certificates of analysis, or nowhere at all.

EPR declarations require you to multiply your sales volumes by your packaging weights for each material. Without a system connecting those two datasets, you're doing it in Excel — manually, per country, per period.

Which PROs do PrestaShop merchants need to register with?

Your obligation is determined by where you ship products, not where your store is hosted. The main PROs for PrestaShop merchants selling across the EU are:

• France — CITEO: Quarterly declarations. PrestaShop is dominant in France and CITEO is one of the strictest PROs on documentation requirements. Registration is mandatory once you exceed the de minimis threshold (currently 5 tonnes or 500 kg for SMEs under the PPWR transition rules).
• Spain — ECOEMBES: Annual declarations, but quarterly advance payments. PrestaShop is widely used by Spanish D2C brands. ECOEMBES requires a producer number (id_productor) to be included in all declarations.
• Germany — LUCID / dual system: Germany has the most complex packaging compliance regime in Europe. You must register in the LUCID system and contract with at least one dual system (e.g. Der Grüne Punkt). Declarations are annual but licensing fees are monthly.
• Italy — CONAI: Annual declarations with quarterly advance payments. CONAI covers all 6 main material streams.
• Poland — Rekopol: Annual declarations. Poland's PrestaShop community is large, and Rekopol is the main PRO for packaging.
• Belgium — Fost Plus: Annual declarations for household packaging.

The data extraction problem

To fill in a CITEO declaration for France, for example, you need to know, for every product you shipped to French customers in the declaration period:

1. How many units sold
2. Primary packaging material and weight (e.g. 45 g glass jar)
3. Secondary packaging material and weight (e.g. 12 g cardboard box)
4. Shipping packaging material and weight (e.g. 380 g cardboard + 30 g filler per order)

From PrestaShop alone, you can get step 1. Steps 2, 3, and 4 require a packaging Bill of Materials (BOM) for every product — information that doesn't exist natively in PrestaShop.

The traditional approach is to export your orders to a spreadsheet, then manually add packaging weights per SKU, multiply, aggregate by country and material, and format according to the PRO's portal requirements. For a store with 50 SKUs shipping to 5 countries, this easily takes two to three full days per declaration period.

The automated approach: the Pack Declare module

The Pack Declare PrestaShop module solves the data extraction problem at the source. Once installed, it hooks into PrestaShop's order lifecycle:

• When an order transitions to Payment accepted, the module pushes the order line (date, country, SKU, qty, currency, amount) to Pack Declare automatically.
• Every time you save a product in your back office, the product reference and name are upserted so you can assign packaging composition without leaving Pack Declare.
• A compliance banner appears at the top of every back-office page showing sync status and linking directly to your declarations.

Inside Pack Declare, you assign a packaging BOM to each SKU — a structured list of materials, levels, and weights. The platform then multiplies your sales volumes by your BOMs, aggregates by country and material, applies the official PRO fee rates, and computes the declaration figures for each portal.

Step-by-step: connect your PrestaShop store

1. Create a Pack Declare account at app.packdeclare.com/signup. The free plan covers one country and is enough to evaluate the platform.
2. Generate an API key under Settings → API Keys. Select the orders:write and products:write scopes. Copy the token — it's shown only once.
3. Download and install the module. Upload packdeclare.zip via Modules → Module Manager → Upload a module in your PrestaShop back office.
4. Configure and test. Paste your API key under Modules → Pack Declare → Configure and click Save & Test Connection. A green confirmation means the key is valid and the connection is live.
5. Assign packaging BOMs. Go to Pack Declare → Products to see the SKUs imported from your store. Use the BOM editor to specify primary, secondary, and shipping packaging components.
6. Run your first declaration. Select the period, country, and PRO. Pack Declare computes your figures in the exact categories used by CITEO, ECOEMBES, LUCID, or any of the other 8 supported PROs — ready to enter in the portal, with a guided checklist.

PrestaShop-specific notes

SKU handling

The module uses PrestaShop's product_reference field as the SKU. If that field is blank, it falls back to PS-{product_id}. We strongly recommend keeping references filled in — consistent SKUs are the foundation of accurate BOMs and correct aggregation.

Historical orders

The module captures events going forward from the moment you install it. To import historical orders for previous declaration periods, export them from PrestaShop's order list to CSV and use Pack Declare's CSV importer to backfill.

Multi-store setup

If you run multiple shops in a PrestaShop multi-store environment, each shop needs its own Pack Declare API key. Orders from each shop will be tagged with the appropriate source so they stay separate in your Pack Declare dashboard.

Returns

PrestaShop's order returns are not automatically forwarded by the module in v1 (order hooks don't fire on return processing). You can import return data separately via CSV if your PRO requires net-of-returns declarations.

CITEO and France: a special note

France is the largest PrestaShop market and also one of the strictest EPR regimes. CITEO requires quarterly declarations and charges eco-modulation fees based on whether your packaging is optimised for recycling. If your packaging uses recycled content or meets specific recyclability criteria, you may be eligible for a reduced rate.

Pack Declare tracks recyclable content at the component level (you can record the percentage of recycled content and the certification scheme) and applies eco-modulation automatically when generating the CITEO submission file. That detail can meaningfully reduce your quarterly invoice.

Is this worth it for a small PrestaShop store?

The PPWR de minimis exemptions are narrow and most EU countries have already removed or reduced them for online sellers. If you ship packaged goods to France and your annual packaging volume exceeds 500 kg (roughly 50,000 standard cardboard e-commerce parcels), you're likely already obligated.

The question isn't whether you need to comply — it's whether you want to spend two days per quarter doing it in a spreadsheet, or twenty minutes in a tool that was built for exactly this.

Start free — no credit card required, and the PrestaShop module download is included in all plans.