German online shops face a special risk: Abmahnungen, paid warning letters from competitors or associations for small legal mistakes on a website. Many of these mistakes are visible in the HTML, so they can be checked automatically.
We built an open checker for this and ran it on 100 well-known German online shops (fashion, food, electronics, beauty, home). 21 blocked automated requests (bot protection) or were unreachable, so the results below cover 79 shops.
What we checked
Per shop, the German Shop Compliance Checker looks at the homepage, the Impressum and a few sampled product pages:
- Legal pages linked from the homepage: Impressum, Datenschutz, AGB, Widerruf, shipping/payment info
- Impressum content: email, German postal address, owner / managing director, VAT ID
- EU ODR link: references to the EU online dispute resolution platform, which was shut down on 20 July 2025
- Product pages: Grundpreis (unit price, PAngV), "inkl. MwSt." VAT note, shipping cost note
- Accessibility (BFSG, in force since June 2025): accessibility statement,
<html lang>, image alt texts
Results (79 shops)
| Finding | Shops |
|---|---|
| No accessibility statement (Barrierefreiheitserklärung) found | 33 |
| Homepage images without alt text | 26 |
| Still referencing the shut-down EU ODR platform | 17 |
| No link to the Widerruf (cancellation) page found on the homepage | 17 |
| Impressum: no German postal address detected | 15 |
| No shipping/payment info link found on the homepage | 15 |
| No Impressum link found on the homepage | 13 |
| No issue found at all | 15 |
On the 37 shops where product pages could be sampled automatically, 11 had a product page without an "inkl. MwSt." VAT note, 10 without a shipping cost note, and 1 without a unit price where one looked necessary.
The median shop scored 86 / 100.
What stands out
1. The dead ODR link is the easiest fix. Since the EU platform was shut down in July 2025, the old mandatory link points to nothing. 17 of 79 shops still have it, usually in the footer, the AGB or the Impressum. Removing one sentence is all it takes.
2. Accessibility is the new blind spot. The BFSG (German Accessibility Act) has applied to many B2C online shops since 28 June 2025. Two in five shops had no accessibility statement we could find. Small businesses are exempt, so not every hit is a violation, but larger shops should look at it.
3. "Missing link" findings need a second look. Some shops load their footer with JavaScript, or call the pages differently. Treat these as a checklist, not as proof.
Run it on your own list
The checker runs on Apify. Paste shop domains and you get one row per shop with a score and every issue (severity, code, message):
{ "shops": ["your-shop.de", "competitor-shop.de"] } Or call it directly:
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/fast_data_asap~german-shop-compliance-checker/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"shops": ["your-shop.de"]}' It costs $10 per 1,000 shops (pay per result). It also works as an MCP tool in Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor: https://mcp.apify.com?tools=fast_data_asap/german-shop-compliance-checker.
Related checks we built for the same market:
- GPSR Product Page Checker: EU product safety details on product pages
- Impressum Contact Extractor: Impressum to structured company data
- AI Crawler & Agent Access Checker: can ChatGPT and AI agents read a shop? (our 100-shop results)
Method: one automated run on 1 November 2026, public pages only, no logins. The checker detects technical signals; it is not legal advice. We do not publish results for individual shops.
