How to Sell Online in the EU — Business Status, Consumer Rules and Channels

How to sell online comes down to two decisions you make before choosing a platform, an ad channel or a store name: whether you need to register a business, and where you will actually sell. Formally, Eurostat's statistical glossary defines e-commerce by how the order is placed — over a computer network — and excludes orders made by phone, fax or a manually typed email (Eurostat, Glossary: E-commerce).

Logistics, customer service, website design and marketing have their own articles in this section, linked where they are useful. Here you settle the legal form and the sales channel, because everything else depends on them.

Do you need to register a business to sell online?

There is no single EU-wide threshold that tells you when occasional online selling has to become a registered business. Member states decide that themselves: the turnover ceiling, whether it is counted per month, quarter or year, any look-back period and the activities that qualify all vary from country to country. A guide that gives you one EU number for this is describing one country's rule.

Two things hold everywhere. First, once you sell to consumers as a trader, EU consumer law applies to you whether or not you have registered a business — the obligations in the next section depend on the kind of sale, not on your registration status. Second, if your activity needs a licence, a permit or entry in a register of regulated activities, you register before your first sale, whatever your turnover; which activities that covers is again set nationally.

Consumer-protection rules that apply once you sell online

Directive 2011/83/EU on consumer rights sets the baseline across the EU, and it applies in the same way to a one-person shop and to a large retailer:

• Information before the sale. Before the consumer is bound by a distance contract, you must give them the information listed in Art. 6(1) — among other things your identity and contact details, the total price including taxes and delivery costs, the arrangements for payment and delivery, and the conditions, time limit and procedure for exercising the right of withdrawal, together with the model withdrawal form.
• 14-day withdrawal right. Art. 9(1) gives the consumer "a period of 14 days to withdraw from a distance or off-premises contract, without giving any reason." If you don't inform the consumer of this right, the period extends by 12 months (Art. 10).
• Refunds within 14 days. Art. 13 requires you to refund all payments, including standard delivery, within 14 days of being notified of the withdrawal — though you may withhold the refund until the goods come back or you receive proof they were sent.
• Return cost. Under Art. 14, the consumer bears only the direct cost of returning the goods, unless you agreed to cover it or failed to inform them that they'd have to.
• Exceptions. Art. 16 excludes certain goods from the withdrawal right altogether — personalised items made to the consumer's specification, perishable goods, and sealed hygiene goods once unsealed after delivery.
• The model withdrawal form. Annex I(B) of the Directive, in its current form after Directive 2019/2161, is the exact text a consumer can use to withdraw — you provide it, you don't reinvent it.
• The lowest price of the last 30 days when you advertise a reduction. Under Art. 6a of Directive 98/6/EC, added by the Omnibus Directive (EU) 2019/2161, any announcement of a price reduction must show the prior price, meaning the lowest price you applied during a period of at least 30 days before the reduction. Member states may set different rules for perishable goods and for products on the market for less than 30 days.

A 2-year legal guarantee applies on top of the withdrawal right. Directive (EU) 2019/771 makes the seller liable for a lack of conformity that "becomes apparent within two years" of delivery (Art. 10(1); member states may extend this). For the first year of that period, the burden of proof is reversed in the consumer's favour — a defect that shows up is presumed to have existed at delivery unless you prove otherwise (Art. 11(1); member states may extend this reversal to 2 years as well).

If you sell physical products, the GPSR — Regulation (EU) 2023/988, applying since 13 December 2024 — adds its own duty for distance sales: your online offer must show, "in a clear and visible manner," the manufacturer's identity and contact details, information letting the buyer identify the exact product, and any safety warnings that would otherwise appear on the packaging (EUR-Lex, CELEX:32023R0988, Art. 19).

A newer requirement applies to online stores too: Directive (EU) 2023/2673 added Art. 11a to Directive 2011/83, requiring a withdrawal function on your site — "labelled with the words 'withdraw from contract here' or an unambiguous corresponding formulation," continuously available throughout the withdrawal period and prominently displayed. Member states had to transpose it by 19 December 2025 and apply it from 19 June 2026, so it is a current obligation; the exact wording of the button in your language and any national details depend on your member state's transposition.

A full walk-through of returns mechanics — and of what changes once a customer is in another EU country — is in our dedicated article on EU cross-border e-commerce.

DAC7 — what a platform reports about your sales

If you sell through a marketplace, an app with a selling feature, or any other platform, that platform's operator may have to report your data to tax authorities under DAC7 — Council Directive (EU) 2021/514, which amended the EU's Directive on Administrative Cooperation. This is the platform operator's obligation, not yours: you don't file anything for this purpose, though the platform may ask you for identification details and a bank account number so it can meet its own obligation.

So-called "excluded sellers" don't get reported. The Directive's threshold for exclusion requires both conditions to hold in the reporting period: fewer than 30 relevant sales activities and total consideration no higher than €2,000. It's a conjunction, not an alternative — a seller who completes 40 transactions worth a combined €1,500 exceeds the activity-count threshold and isn't excluded, even though they're under the amount threshold; equally, a seller who completes only 10 transactions worth €3,000 isn't excluded either, despite staying well under the activity count.

DAC7 has applied across the EU since 1 January 2023; how and when each member state implemented it is a national matter.

Being an excluded seller changes nothing in your obligations to customers. The consumer rules in the previous section, including the 14-day withdrawal right, apply regardless of DAC7: one regime is about tax reporting, the other about consumer protection, and meeting the conditions of one does not exempt you from the other.

Keep DAC7 separate from any national threshold for trading without registration, too. The national threshold decides whether you have to register a business at all; the DAC7 threshold (30 sales or €2,000 in the reporting period) only decides whether the platform reports your data to the tax authority. You can cross one and not the other, in either direction. A platform asking you for identification details and a bank account number therefore does not mean you have to set up a business — it is a consequence of the operator's own obligation.

Where to sell: marketplace, your own store, social commerce

Eurostat's enterprise survey shows how EU businesses actually split their online sales. Among enterprises with 10 or more people employed, 9.31% sell via an e-commerce marketplace, 17.72% sell via their own website or app, and 23.59% have any e-commerce sales at all (Eurostat, isoc_ec_eseln2, updated 2026-06-15, 2024 data, read 2026-10-01). By value, marketplaces account for 15.54% of EU businesses' web-sales revenue (Eurostat, isoc_ec_evaln2, updated 2026-02-27, 2024 data).

On the demand side, 73.56% of EU individuals aged 16–74 bought something online in the last 12 months (Eurostat, isoc_ec_ib20, updated 2026-04-17, 2025 data) — so most of your potential customers already buy online; the question is through which channel you meet them.

• Marketplace. Amazon's EU Professional seller plan costs €39 a month (excl. VAT), with most referral fees falling between 8% and 15% (sell.amazon.fr/tarifs, read 2026-09-30). eBay's business-seller fees combine a percentage commission with a fixed per-order fee of €0.35 (€0.45 above €10) on its German site — other EU eBay sites set their own tables (ebay.de/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices). Allegro, one of the larger marketplaces operating across Central Europe, reports over 160,000 partners and around 8 million Smart! customers across the region (about.allegro.eu); how API integration and stock sync with a marketplace actually works is covered in marketplace integration.
• Your own store. Full control over customer data, margin and brand — without a marketplace's built-in traffic, which you have to build yourself. Choosing a platform for your own store is covered in our platforms section.
• Social commerce and TikTok Shop. TikTok's seller programme, TikTok Shop, is live in 13 European markets, and its FAQ confirms you can register as an "Individual seller" without a registered business entity — a VAT number is only required for sole traders and corporate sellers in Italy and Germany specifically. Meta's Shops have moved to on-site checkout since September 2025, with in-Shop payment processing discontinued (Meta Business Help Center) — country availability for Shops itself varies, so check Meta's current list for your market rather than assuming it.
• Price comparison. Google's free product listings and its Comparison Shopping Services programme operate across the EU and EEA. Independent comparison engines such as idealo run separate national sites in several EU countries; how they charge and how much traffic they send is covered in our article on price comparison sites.

None of these channels rules out the others. You can run a marketplace presence and your own store at the same time, with social channels and comparison sites adding traffic on top — they don't replace either of the two main channels.

How to sell online: the order of decisions

Before you pick a name, a logo or a specific platform, settle these in order:

1. Legal status. Check your own country's rules for trading without formal business registration — there's no EU number to check against, only a national one. If what you sell requires a licence, permit or regulated-activity registration, you register regardless of turnover.
2. Sales channel. Marketplace first — faster traffic, less control over margin and customer data — or your own store from day one — more work upfront, full control? You can run both.
3. Geographic reach. Just your home market, or shipping across the EU from the start? If the latter, the €10,000 annual OSS threshold — which covers your combined cross-border B2C sales to all EU countries together, not per country — decides how you set up VAT from day one rather than reworking it later (EU OSS portal). Below it, you can account for VAT as if you were still selling domestically; above it, VAT is due where your customer is, and OSS registration is the practical way to handle that without registering separately in every destination country.
4. Launch budget. Platform, hosting, any marketplace integration and your first marketing spend — that's a separate costing exercise, not a legal decision.

If you're weighing SaaS, open source and custom code against each other, or want a real cost estimate instead of guessing from someone else's numbers, calculate the cost of your store — you get a breakdown by cost item, not a market average that may not match your product range or scale. A full breakdown of typical launch and running costs — platform, integrations, first marketing push — is in how much does an online store cost.

This order has practical consequences, not just formal ones. Legal status decides what you have to collect from your first order — pre-contract information, a withdrawal process — and whether VAT registration is immediate. Channel decides whose payment and shipping tools you're working within: a marketplace usually imposes its own checkout and return rules, your own store means configuring all of that yourself. Geographic reach decides whether VAT and your terms need to be built for more than one country from day one. Settling these three before choosing a specific platform saves you from reconfiguring later — the platform and its cost are the last step in this decision, not the first.

Promoting your first sale

Marketing an online store is a large topic of its own in this section, not one paragraph here. Before you spend anything on advertising, work out where your customers actually look for products — inside marketplace and store search bars, on Google, or on social platforms — and decide how you'll measure every channel on the same basis, rather than comparing numbers that mean different things in different tools. Only then choose specific tactics: a product feed for Google, a catalogue for Meta, a presence on TikTok, or an SMS campaign to repeat customers. The full map of ecommerce marketing channels — from Google Shopping and Meta Ads to SMS, affiliate marketing and price comparison sites — is in our ecommerce marketing section.