RecallWatch — Catalog Recall Monitor

Screen a merchant catalog against the official U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission recall database. RecallWatch accepts JSON products or pasted CSV, produces explainable candidates, and preserves monitoring state for scheduled follow-up runs.

Why buyers use it

Federal law prohibits selling or offering recalled consumer products in the United States. CPSC also tells online resellers to check products before listing them. RecallWatch turns that manual search into a bounded catalog report while keeping the merchant in control of every decision.

What a run returns

• exact_identifier_match: a normalized UPC, EAN, or GTIN appears in the official notice.
• strong_candidate: both the supplied brand and a sufficiently distinctive model appear in the official notice.
• review_candidate: brand and multiple distinctive title terms overlap; this is intentionally review-only.
• no_candidate: the deterministic rules found no candidate. This is not a safety certification.

Every candidate includes the match reasons, official recall number and date, hazard/remedy text, and the direct CPSC link. The run also produces a self-contained HTML report, a CSV report, and structured dataset rows.

Input

Provide exactly one of:

1. products: up to 5,000 JSON objects; or
2. catalogCsv: up to 2 MB of pasted CSV with a header.

Recognized field aliases include:

Meaning	Accepted examples
SKU	sku, id, product_id, variant_id
Title	title, name, product_name
Brand	brand, vendor, manufacturer
Model	model, model_number, mpn, part_number
Identifier	upc, gtin, ean, barcode

Use a stable monitorKey on an Apify schedule. Later runs compare the current candidate snapshot with the previous successful snapshot. Source or report failures preserve the prior state.

Safety and operating boundaries

• Only the fixed official CPSC API is queried; no marketplace or customer PII is collected.
• The run fails closed if the official response is truncated, malformed, or older than the configured freshness limit.
• Reports explain candidates; they never auto-delist products or claim legal compliance.
• CPSC data has limited structured identifiers. As a live July 2026 snapshot, only a minority of notices expose UPCs and the API's product Model field is generally empty; product descriptions remain important. Expect false negatives and require human confirmation.
• Billing occurs only after the catalog and official source have been processed successfully and before report delivery.

Automation

Create an Apify schedule using the same input and monitor key. Use Apify's run-status or dataset webhooks to deliver alertRequired summaries. A high-confidence new candidate sets alertRequired: true; unchanged reports stay quiet when onlyChanges is enabled.

Sources

• CPSC Recall API information
• CPSC guidance for online resale
• CPSC retailer and reverse-logistics guidance

RecallWatch is a screening and workflow tool, not legal advice, a product-safety certification, or a substitute for reviewing the official notice and the actual item.