Legal Notice Requirement (Impressum)

In Germany, commercial online offerings must provide a legal notice (Impressum) stating the provider’s full name and address, a means of contact (including email), the authorised representative in the case of legal entities, and where applicable the commercial register number and supervisory authority. Since May 2024 the legal basis has been § 5 of the Digital Services Act (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, DDG), which replaced the previously applicable § 5 of the Telemedia Act (Telemediengesetz, TMG) – in substance the mandatory details have remained largely the same.

In Austria, the comparable disclosure duty arises from § 5 of the E-Commerce Act (E-Commerce-Gesetz, ECG) and, additionally, from the Trade Regulation Act. Switzerland has no “Impressum requirement” identical to TMG/ECG, but the Federal Act against Unfair Competition (UWG) does require providers to make their name and address clearly recognisable in commercial dealings.

The details must be easily recognisable, directly accessible and permanently available. A legal notice that can only be found by detours does not meet that requirement. In practice this means a clearly labelled link in the page footer, reachable without a search function and without logging in. Fake shops like to hide the page behind cryptic labels, embed it as an image, or set it up so that it exists but is linked from nowhere.

For fake-shop detection, what matters is less the mere existence of a legal notice than its plausibility. Typical red flags: the named company appears in no register. The address belongs to a pure office service provider or to a residential building with no commercial connection at all. The stated legal form does not match the register number. The identical legal notice appears word for word on several shops with different product ranges. Or the company seat is in a country that does not fit the domain, the language and the bank details given.

Two checks take less than five minutes together and are almost always worth it. First: enter the company name in the relevant register – in Germany the commercial register, in Austria the Firmenbuch, in Switzerland the central business index. Does the company exist, and do its seat and authorised representatives match the legal notice? Second: look the address up in a map service. Is there a warehouse, a single-family house, or an address shared by dozens of companies?

A concrete example: an electronics shop names a “Musterhandel GmbH” with an address in a small town and the register number HRB 123456. In the commercial register, that number belongs to a construction company with a different name; according to the map service the address is an apartment block. None of these individual observations would be conclusive on its own – together they add up to a legal notice that has obviously been assembled rather than being genuine.

Provider identification also requires a means of contact that allows rapid electronic communication. A bare contact form without any address does not satisfy that. A simple test: before buying, send a factual question about delivery times to the address given. If the mail bounces as undeliverable or goes unanswered for days while the shop simultaneously promises “dispatch within 24 hours”, the two do not add up.

The legal notice never stands alone, either. Reputable shops also provide withdrawal instructions, terms and conditions, shipping cost and delivery information and a privacy policy. Contradictions between these pages are revealing: if the legal notice gives a Berlin address, the withdrawal instructions state a return address in a third country and the terms speak of a completely different company name, this has been assembled from templates.

Equally typical are text fragments that do not fit the shop – withdrawal instructions for digital content in a furniture shop, say, or privacy notes referring to a travel agency. Such leftovers give away where the template came from. They are not fraud in themselves, but they show that nobody ever read the legal texts – not a good sign for the care taken with the rest of the offering.

For consumers the practical significance matters more than the legal one: without complete provider details there is nobody to direct a reversal to. A complaint, a withdrawal and, in the worst case, a lawsuit all need a nameable contracting party with an address at which they can be served. If that is missing, it is not merely a formal defect – it is the reason why nobody can be held to account later.

One final check is always worth it: search for the exact company name together with terms such as “experiences” or “complaint”. If the same name appears in forums about several completely different shops, or if consumer protection bodies have issued warnings, the matter is usually already settled – and settled before any money has changed hands.

Conversely: an incomplete legal notice is first of all a competition-law violation, not proof of fraud. Small, newly founded merchants regularly forget mandatory details without any fraudulent intent. The point only becomes meaningful in combination: an incomplete legal notice together with advance payment only, a very young domain and prices far below market level is a far stronger signal than any single feature.