Shopify Legally Compliant Price Display

Display prices in the Shopify store in a legally compliant manner

In this video we will show you how to display the VAT for your Shopify store in a legally compliant manner, as well as how to display basic prices and strike prices in a legally compliant manner. Make your Shopify store legally compliant with the help of the Händlerbund.

Presenting value-added tax, base prices and strike prices in a legally compliant manner

Previously, we showed you how to generate legal texts with the help of the Händlerbund and then integrate them into your Shopify store in a legally compliant manner and display them in the frontend in a permanently visible manner. In this blog article, we get closer to our plan to make the store legally compliant piece by piece by taking care of the legally compliant price display. This will be divided into three parts – namely, the first will be VAT, the second will be base prices, and the last will be strike prices.

So what do you have to consider when displaying and indicating prices and taxes in your online store?

All price information must be clearly visible to the consumer. This also includes, among other things, a reference to value added tax. We will now show you how to display them in the total price. In your Shopify backend, go to the settings at the bottom left and there go to the tax settings. You can see here the configurations for tax regions and tax calculations. Make sure that the “All prices are displayed including taxes” box is checked. Thus, the information “incl. VAT” should now also appear in the frontend for each of your items at the total price. We check this once by looking at a store preview and lo and behold, the hint is actually played out. Thus, we have fulfilled the obligation.
This allows us to turn our attention to the basic prices.

Shopify Legally Compliant Price Display - When do base prices have to be displayed?

Whether they need to be reported depends on the products you sell. If you are new to online trading and do not yet know whether your products fall under this category, we would like to link you to the “Information sheet on the indication of basic prices in online stores” from the Händlerbund.
We strongly recommend that you read through this if you are making sure that your store is legally compliant yourself and you have not subscribed to a Händlerbund plan that includes a store in-depth review.

Shopify Legally Compliant Price Display - What is the Base Price?

The basic price is the price per unit of quantity, including sales tax and other price components, and is intended to enable the consumer to compare prices more easily, especially in the case of packaging with different filling quantities. In other words, it’s all about transparency for the customer. The first question also answers who has to declare them – namely traders who commercially sell goods to end customers, which are offered under indication of weight, volume, length or area. Question three goes on to state that this includes goods in prepackages, goods in open packages, and goods sold as a sales unit without wrapping. But where must this basic price now take place in the online store?
According to the paragraph mentioned here, the base price must be displayed next to the total price in close proximity. The basic price must be stated in the detailed description and, if prices are also advertised on the product overview pages and/or elsewhere in the online store, also there. It is not sufficient to state the basic price only in the general product description, which can only be reached by clicking on the product. This means that both prices must be perceptible at a glance. A direct spatial relationship of the basic prices to the total prices is therefore mandatory. It is also not permitted to visually emphasize the basic price over the total price. In the further course of this leaflet, it will be clarified how this basic price information has to be provided in your store, as well as other special cases, such as e.g. the price of a product. the sale of capsules or cables. We can only endorse the advice at the end of this document from the Händlerbund that you take these points into consideration and compare the information with your store and then compare and possibly correct it, as missing basic price information is subject to a warning.

Shopify Legally Compliant Price Display - Base Prices in Shopify

Let’s apply them to our Shopify store. For this we go into the settings of our product and see here the field “Show base price for this product”, where we now set our checkmark, now we enter the dimensions of the entire product. We sell in our store hypothetically 1Kg of muesli. The base price is therefore also 5€ per kg. It’s best to check for yourself whether your base prices are actually played. In our case, this is already supported by the theme. If this is not the case for you, you will need to add code snippets. We just can’t go through that for this video, unfortunately, because it would go beyond the scope. However, if you click on the hint in the yellow box, you will be shown instructions on how to proceed in this case. This means that we have also ticked off the basic prices. So all that’s missing are the strike prices.

Using strike prices in a legally secure manner

If you don’t know what the term means yet – these are before/after prices, so to speak. You can set them up again in the same place, in the editing area of the product. Here, this strike price is titled as the comparison price. If we now set this, save and go to the frontend, we see that this has changed. However, there are some things to consider for this as well, as it is a certain form of advertising that is bound by rules. e.g. it must be transparently explained to the consumer how long the discount applies and what the crossed-out price refers to. Moreover, utopian prices cannot simply be invented. If you don’t want to get a warning. So read these guidelines for price advertising from the Händlerbund thoroughly. Otherwise, you can also access the price models here under Performance and Membership Packages, which you can use to find out which packages include the in-depth store check, where such things are then checked in detail, for example.

For all other Shopify questions contact eBakery

I hope this article helped you to get closer to the legal security of your store. If there are any extra legal questions regarding Shopify SEO, Shopify store creation or general Shopify setup, contact our experts, we will be happy to help you as a Shopify agency.

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