Mandatory details and legal basis
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. The usual form is 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 without linking to it from anywhere.
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 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.
Checking plausibility
A legal notice is quickly written, so the check is about 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 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?
One final check: search for the company name in its full spelling together with terms such as “experiences” or “complaint”. If the same name appears in forums about several different shops, or if consumer protection bodies have issued warnings, the matter is usually settled before any money has changed hands.
Other mandatory texts
Other mandatory texts sit alongside the legal notice. 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 different company name, this has been assembled from templates.
Equally typical are text fragments that do not fit the shop, such as withdrawal instructions for digital content in a furniture shop 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 read the legal texts. That speaks against the care taken with the rest of the offering.
What an incomplete notice tells you
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, nobody can be held to account later.
An incomplete legal notice is first of all a competition-law violation and not yet 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.