Product safety certification/approval is the process of evaluating an electrical product to applicable standards and/or specifications, which are dictated by the type of product and the locality for which the sale of the product is intended.

Product safety standards were typically written and enforced on a country by country level. Early on, the local nature of the regulations were not problematic, as local markets tended to be served by local manufacturers; American manufacturers built products for American consumers, Japanese manufacturers built for the Japanese consumers, and so on.