On 27 September 2026 a new information requirement lands on every brand selling goods to consumers in the EU. Your storefront has to carry a standard European notice telling shoppers they have a legal guarantee of at least two years. The artwork is fixed, you cannot redesign it, and it applies whether your company sits in Ohio, London or Berlin.

Two separate things arrive together, and the difference matters commercially. The notice is universal. Every trader selling goods to EU consumers displays it, online and in store, before the customer commits to buy. Sitting alongside it is the GARAN label, a fixed European label covering a producer's voluntary durability guarantee. That one is conditional.

GARAN only becomes mandatory when all six of these are true at once:

• The guarantee comes from the producer, not from you as the retailer
• It covers durability, not general satisfaction
• It costs the customer nothing extra
• It covers the whole product, not one component
• It runs for more than two years, so exactly 24 months does not qualify
• The producer passes that information to you

The last point is the one most brands will be relieved to hear. You are not required to go hunting for guarantee information your suppliers have never given you. If a producer supplies nothing, you display nothing, and you are compliant. Your own extended warranty does not trigger the label either. The higher risk is the opposite behaviour: publishing a GARAN label with incomplete supporting detail, which in Germany is exactly the kind of thing competitors and consumer associations act on.

For a brand selling direct, this is a website job with a real engineering component. The notice sits at shop level rather than on each product, reachable from your site header, your category pages and your checkout, in the language of the market you are selling into. The label, where it applies, sits on the individual product page before purchase. For brands selling through marketplaces it is mostly a product data job instead: brand, model identifier and guarantee duration held as structured attributes that the platform can read.

There is a trap for UK brands in particular. Great Britain is outside all of this, because the Consumer Rights Act 2015 governs there and prescribes no notice or label at all. Showing the European notice to a British shopper describes a two year conformity regime that is not British law. Most brands therefore need their storefront to show different content depending on where the customer is, rather than one global footer.

The deeper question this raises is a data one. Plenty of brands cannot currently say which of their products carry a qualifying producer guarantee, because nobody has ever needed to record it. That is not a legal problem, it is a catalogue problem, and it is the sort of thing that surfaces every time a European information duty changes.

Getting product data into shape for one requirement usually means the next one costs far less, which is why Expandly treats compliance as the first stage of expansion rather than a task bolted on at the end.