CPSC Recalls vs. Product Safety Warnings
A recall-only integration can miss a separate class of CPSC publication: Product Safety Warnings. The two sources should be tracked independently and reported with their own provenance.
What is a Product Safety Warning?
CPSC publishes Product Safety Warnings separately from recalls. The agency may use a warning when a responsible company or online seller does not agree to an acceptable recall, is not responsive or cannot be identified.
That makes warnings relevant to a marketplace or reseller workflow even though they are not delivered through the same recall notice collection.
Why the sources should not be silently merged
A response should name whether evidence came from a recall or a warning, link to the official publication and include the synchronization time. Provenance matters because the publication type, requested consumer action and available company remedy can differ.
LookTwice normalizes both into a matching workflow without pretending they are identical records.
What a resilient service does when a source is stale
Freshness has to be tracked independently for recalls and warnings. If either required source has not synchronized successfully within the service freshness window, LookTwice returns source_stale and does not charge for the check.
This prevents a partial feed failure from being presented as a confident none result.
Frequently asked questions
Are CPSC Product Safety Warnings the same as recalls?
No. They are separate CPSC publication types and appear in separate official collections.
Why check warnings if I already use the Recall API?
A warning may cover a product when a company or seller does not participate in an acceptable recall, so recall-only coverage can be incomplete for screening.
How does LookTwice show the difference?
Each match includes its source type, official URL, check time, match basis and notice details.