Every country has its own set of requirements the online businesses must comply with. If you run your online business in Germany, you need to make sure your online store meets those of your country.

You have all the necessary features that will help you set up your store so it complies with German laws. We designed the features as separate settings that you can enable/disable at any time in your store admin.

In order to activate German specific features, you should set German address as your company address in Control Panel → Eins tellungen → Allgemein → Shopprofil.

Your products have to indicate proper tax rates. There are 2 ways you can set up taxes in your store – automatic and manual. In order to set automatic tax rates, proceed to Einstellungen → Steuern.

Note that if there is more than one tax rate in your store, you need to assign the necessary tax to each product manually. Go to Katalog → Artikel, open each product, open the Steuern und Versandkosten tab, and enable the proper tax rate for this product by marking a checkbox next to it.

If you are a small business owner and your turnover is not big, you may not be required to collect and pay VAT. However, the law obliges small business owners to notify their customers about their special tax status. To enable such notification in your store, please proceed to Einstellungen → Steuern and enable the option Ich bin Kleinunternehmer gemäß § 19 UStG:

After you enable this option, the corresponding note will appear on the Product Details pages in your store:

Enabling this option does not affect the actual tax calculation process in your store. You must separately configure the way the taxes are calculated and displayed in your store.

If you no longer meet the criteria for getting the special tax status and are obliged to collect VAT, set your tax rates in Einstellungen → Steuern and disable the Ich bin Kleinunternehmer gemäß § 19 UStG option.

You can set the required product properties using product attributes:

For Lieferzeit, you might want to put an asterisk into the attribute value to add a footnote regarding the shipping costs.
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If you add essential product characteristics as product attributes, they appear on the product page in your store. It makes it easier for your customers to decide what product to purchase.

Once you add the product attributes values, they show in the Product page, the Cart page, and the Order Confirmation page.

If a product can be measured in units such as kilograms, liters, meters, you need to specify the exact price for that unit of measurement in your store. Navigate to Einstellungen → Allgemein → Warenkorb page and enable the Einzelpreis Anzeigen option. After that:

If you sell energy-consuming products in your store (household electrical appliances, electric lamps, etc), you are obliged to show the energy labels and the datasheet for such products. You can do this with the help of our special application "Energy labels". This app allows you to fulfill the law requirements and provide your customers with the necessary information about your energy-consuming products.

The application can be installed from App Market. Once the app is installed, detailed instructions on how to add energy labels and product data sheets will be shown under the “Energy Labels” tab in your Katalog → Energy Labels.

If you sell digital products, your customers are eligible to return purchases within 14 days for a full refund unless they have started downloading or streaming digital goods. If you would like to avoid refund requests for the digital products purchased in your store, you may ask your customers for a consent to the expiration of the right of return when a digital item is purchased.

To enable this option in your store, go to Einstellungen → Allgemein → Rechtliche Hinweise and activate the Kontrollkästchen zum Einholen der Einwilligung zum vorzeitigen Erlöschen des Widerrufsrechts bei digitalen Produkten option:

When the option is enabled, the corresponding mandatory checkbox will be shown on the Cart page in your store.

You may need to use your customers’ email addresses for different store purposes: send reminders about abandoned carts or pass email addresses over to a shipping carrier company. The customer's email address is considered personal data, which means you must receive explicit permission from customers to use their emails. To request such permission from your store customers, use a special checkbox in the store checkout page.

To enable and set the checkbox

Once you have activated the option, the corresponding checkbox is displayed at checkout, under the e-mail address input field:

After a customer grants permission to use their email, this information appears at the bottom in the order details:

You can display a banner on your storefront asking for a customer’s consent for tracking. The banner appears once a customer starts browsing the website, and doesn’t disappear until they make a selection. The customer data is only tracked if they click Accept. You can enable the banner under Einstellungen → Allgemein, the GDPR cookie consent banner block.

We recommend checking the default text on the banner and updating it to your needs. For example, you can use the following text:

Our website may use Facebook Pixel and cookies for statistical purposes and to track how our marketing activities on Facebook are recorded and improved. Similarly, we may use Google Analytics to monitor the activity on our website. Information on Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics, cookies, and your right to object can be found in our Privacy Policy.

To update the banner’s text use the Storefront Label Editor application and set the necessary content for the Notice.TrackingConsent.description label.

It is required to display the legal information concerning delivery, privacy policy, terms of service, etc in your store. Please, contact your legal advisor to get the required legal documents

To add legal pages to CM4all site builder:

Gilt für Lieferungen innerhalb Deutschland. Lieferzeiten für andere Länder finden Sie hier

Select the “hier” word, click the link icon in the editor toolbar and add the link to your Versandkosten page in your store account (you can find the URL for this page as described above).

If you offer express shipping methods, your Lieferzeit attribute might say:

Standard max. 5 Tage, Express 1 Tag*

In this case, the footnote should be:

Gilt für Lieferungen nach Deutschland bei Standardversand. Bei Expressversand gilt eine Lieferzeit von 1 Tag innerhalb Deutschlands. Lieferzeiten für andere Länder und Informationen zur Berechnung des Liefertermins siehe hier

Again, select the “hier” word, then click the link icon in the editor toolbar and add the link to your Versandkosten page in your store.

If you offer express shipping methods, your Lieferzeit attribute might say:

Standard max. 5 Tage, Express 1 Tag*

And then the footnote text should be:

*Gilt für Lieferungen nach Deutschland bei Standardversand. Bei Expressversand gilt eine Lieferzeit von 1 Tag innerhalb Deutschlands. Lieferzeiten für andere Länder und Informationen zur Berechnung des Liefertermins siehe <a href="LINK">hier</a>

Again, replace the LINK in this text with the URL of your Versandkosten page (you can find out the URL for this page as described above).

According to one of the European directives, every European trader should provide a link to the platform for online dispute resolution (so-called "OS-platform") where the trader and a customer could try to resolve their disputes about online purchases out-of-court.

To meet this requirement, just add a short description and a link to the OS-platform in the About us page (Einstellungen → Allgemein → Rechtliche Hinweise).

Here are the examples:

Sometimes you may want to show your customers an important note at checkout.

For example, if the customers are outside of the European Union, some extra charges like custom duties may appear. Adding such notes to your store is possible with the help of a special application which allows displaying any text at the top of the following checkout pages:

It is the Checkout notices app from the App Market. After you have installed the app, open it, and click Enable near the name of the page you'd like to add a note to, then enter your text to the field that appears.

If the note contains the information about extra charges (e.g. customs duty), we also recommend adding this information to the Order confirmation email. You can change the notification template in Einstellungen → E-Mail.