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Are you still unsure about what you need to do about the new legislation from the Danish government about age verification on age restricted products, then this is the article for you.
From the October 1. Danish web shops are no longer allowed to sell age restricted products like alcohol, tobacco or nicotine to customers without a proper age verification process. This means that if you run a web shop that sells these thing you are no longer allowed to sell them, from TODAY, until you have this up and running.
But figuring out how to set up appropriate age verification in a way that works for you, your customers and doesn’t go against regulations can be hard to do, so we have gathered a lot of tips, so you can keep selling without fearing legal repercussions.
It is very important to know what the restrictions are, especially when you are selling heavily regulated products like alcohol or nicotine.
This is even more important now that you need to setup your products on your site to the specific age limit to allow people to only access the product they are allowed to.
The age limits:
The new regulations means that the old age verification popup is no longer enough. There needs to be actual verification for the customer that isn’t just their word.
This means that you need a new way to do this in a way that doesn’t break GDPR. There are a few ways to do this. One of them is the very manual way of having customers send in photos of their passports and then you verify it. This means that you have to do the work, but also require you to find a way to save this information without breaking any data protection laws as you need to be able to document the age verification, since passports are very sensitive information.
Another one is using MitID to verify the age and identity of people, like it is done on most Danish banking apps or when you use your credit card online. This will require a bit of setup to implement the verification on your site and make sure that it applies to the right ages and the right products.
If you aren’t an experienced programmer, then this might be a bit of a daunting task, but there are already a few different solutions that have been made for you to simply add to your store and let them do most of the work.
One of these is the plugin WooCheck made specifically for WordPress and WooCommerce stores and will allow you to add MitID to your store.
Verification needs to take place whenever a sale of an age restricted product take place. This means that customer who makes such a purchase needs to, at some point, have been verified.
Now if your website has the ability for people to create and log into users then they will only need to verify themselves once as long as they are logged in.
If this is not the case then verification needs to take place before a purchase is completed at every purchase.
It is also important to remember to consider security and data protection in this equation. A lot of the information you might get access to can be sensitive in nature, which means that you have a responsibility to save it in a secure way.
So, it is important that you are mindful of what data that your chosen solution gives you and what you can or cannot save. You should also make sure to erase data that you no longer need.
If you want to read more about what the Danish Safety Technology Authority has to say then you can read more about it here.
If you are running a web shop that sells age restricted products in Denmark, then it is important that you take the time to understand and do something, so that you are in compliance with the latest regulations by the Danish government. There are a lot of different solutions out there, so there is no need for you to give up and close down your shop.
