Customer Reviews: The Authenticity Notice Under German Law

Since 28 May 2022 German law has carried a rule that is regularly misread in practice (European Commission 2022): anyone who makes customer reviews accessible in their own shop must inform readers whether and how they ensure that those reviews come from people who actually bought or used the product (Gesetze im Internet). This is a duty to inform - not a duty to verify. The distinction sounds academic, yet it decides whether two honest sentences below your review list are enough or whether a well-meant phrase saddles you with a control obligation you will then be measured against. This article separates the two levels, sorts out the two per-se prohibitions in the annex to the UWG and describes where the notice technically belongs in a shop.

A duty to inform, not to verify: the core of Section 5b (3)

With the Act Strengthening Consumer Protection in Competition and Trade Law, the German legislator transposed Directive (EU) 2019/2161, which applies from 28 May 2022 (European Commission 2022). For customer reviews this produced Section 5b (3) of the UWG, the German Act Against Unfair Competition. The provision counts information about how authenticity is ensured among the material information a trader owes consumers (Gesetze im Internet). If it is missing, misleading omission is close at hand - regardless of whether the reviews on display are genuine. The reproach is not aimed at the reviews but at the silence about their origin.

Where a trader makes accessible reviews of goods or services carried out by consumers, information about whether and how the trader ensures that the published reviews originate from consumers who have actually used or purchased the goods or services shall be regarded as material.

Section 5b (3) UWG, working translation (Gesetze im Internet)

Two words carry the whole provision: whether and how. Traders who take measures to secure authenticity describe them. Traders who take none must say so too; the explanatory memorandum to the bill is unambiguous here and calls for information about precisely that circumstance (Deutscher Bundestag). No obligation to check arises from the provision itself. It demands transparency about the actual state of affairs, not a particular state of affairs. That is why a small shop without any verification procedure gets by with two factual sentences - as long as those sentences are true.

The scope is narrower than many assume. It covers traders who make consumer reviews accessible themselves. Anyone who merely points via a link to reviews published by third parties is not caught by the duty, according to the explanatory memorandum (Deutscher Bundestag). This distinction matters more in daily practice than it sounds: an embedded review module whose content appears on your product page makes the reviews accessible - in ordinary e-commerce implementations that is precisely the standard case. A plain text link to an external portal usually is not.

Annex numbers 23b and 23c: two prohibitions without balancing

Alongside the duty to inform, two offences sit in the annex to the UWG. Commercial practices listed there are prohibited towards consumers in every case (Gesetze im Internet). There is no balancing of interests, no materiality threshold and no justification through industry custom. Whoever meets the definition acts unfairly, full stop. That is exactly why these two numbers are more dangerous for shop operators than the duty to inform itself.

• Number 23b prohibits claiming that reviews originate from consumers who actually purchased or used the product without reasonable and proportionate steps having been taken to verify this (Gesetze im Internet).
• Number 23c prohibits submitting or commissioning fake consumer reviews as well as misrepresenting consumer reviews and endorsements for sales promotion purposes (Gesetze im Internet).
• Both offences apply independently of Section 5b (3) UWG. Correct information does not cure a false claim, and conversely an honest claim does not replace the information.
• The annex applies towards consumers. In B2B commerce the general provisions remain in force - which does not remove the requirement of truthful statements, it merely derives it differently.

Number 23b explains why the advertising word costs more than the thing itself. As long as you simply display reviews, the duty to inform applies. The moment you attach the label "verified reviews" or "from genuine buyers only" to your list, you make a claim - and must be able to evidence the verification behind it. The explanatory memorandum puts it plainly: what is unfair is the claim made without a corresponding check; if the trader refrains from the claim, no duty to check arises either (Deutscher Bundestag).

Immediate visual context: where the notice has to sit

Section 5b (3) UWG does not spell out where the notice appears. The answer sits in Section 5a (2) UWG: withholding material information also covers providing it in an unclear, unintelligible or ambiguous manner, or not providing it in good time (Gesetze im Internet). A paragraph in the terms and conditions is therefore not a safe place. In good time means before the review influences the purchase decision - in other words, where the stars are. The same logic that makes misleading design patterns in the checkout attackable also hits a hidden authenticity notice.

How far practice was from that standard is shown by a coordinated screening run by consumer protection authorities from 26 member states plus Iceland and Norway, published in January 2022: 223 major websites were screened for misleading customer reviews (European Commission 2022). For 144 of them the authorities could not confirm that sufficient measures were in place to secure the authenticity of the reviews (European Commission 2022). 104 of the 223 websites did not inform consumers at all about how reviews are collected and processed (European Commission 2022) - and only 84 made this information accessible on the review page itself, the rest mentioned it in the small print (European Commission 2022).

What belongs in the notice text

The notice describes three things: who may write a review, what happens to incoming reviews and whether contributions are removed. As an example of reasonable measures, the explanatory memorandum names technical means that check the credibility of the person posting the review, such as asking whether the goods were actually purchased or used (Deutscher Bundestag). Traders who do none of this write exactly that. An honest sentence is legally more stable than a polished description, and it can be evidenced in a dispute. If you are unsure which wording matches your procedure, a short consulting session on the approach settles it faster than a template found online.

1. Origin: who may review - every visitor, registered accounts, or only people with a completed order?
2. Procedure: is the order technically linked to the review, and does that happen automatically or by hand?
3. Scope: are all incoming reviews published, positive as well as negative?
4. Filtering: by which criteria is a contribution rejected, and who decides?
5. Incentives: are there vouchers, discounts or prize draws for reviews, and how are such contributions labelled?
6. Reference: which period and which number of reviews does the displayed average rating relate to?

Implementation in the shop: data model and output

Technically the obligation is not a large project. In the draft bill the legislator assumed an average of 60 minutes per company for drafting the statement and embedding it technically (Deutscher Bundestag) and estimated around 9,360 affected companies in Germany (Deutscher Bundestag). The real effort arises elsewhere: the notice has to match the actual procedure and appear in every view that shows a rating. It therefore pays to hold the status of each review in a dedicated field instead of inferring it from context.

{
  "review_id": "R-2026-018342",
  "product_sku": "SKU-4471-BL",
  "stars": 4,
  "origin": "order",
  "order_ref": "<order number>",
  "purchase_proof": "automatic",
  "incentive": "none",
  "visible": true,
  "rejection_reason": null,
  "notice_version": "v3",
  "captured_at": "2026-08-14"
}

From this data model the notice text can be derived instead of freely drafted: if origin is consistently set to order, the text describes a link to the purchase. If free reviews occur alongside them, the text has to name both routes. A pre-launch check reports when field and notice text drift apart - the same mechanism that carries mandatory product information under the product safety regulation. We set up models of this kind in Shopware projects on the basis of the Community Edition, without additional external components.

• Product detail page: notice immediately at the review block
• Category and search view: short form next to the average rating
• Structured data: review count and period match the visible display
• Product data feeds: no rating without the corresponding number of reviews
• Newsletters and ads: rating advertising carries the same notice as the shop
• Archive: removed reviews remain traceable with reason and timestamp

Advertising with ratings outside the product page

As soon as an average rating leaves the shop, the duty to inform travels with it. A rating in an ad, in a search result snippet or in an email is an advertising statement about consumer assessment. The European screening showed the largest gaps here: 118 of the screened websites contained no information on how fake reviews are prevented (European Commission 2022), and 176 websites did not mention whether incentives for reviews are excluded or how such contributions are otherwise labelled (European Commission 2022).

The reference figures are part of the statement. A rating without the number of underlying reviews and without a recognisable period cannot be checked and is therefore attackable. Placing a top score drawn from twelve reviews next to a category holding three thousand reviews creates an impression the data does not support. The same care that strikethrough prices and discount advertising demand applies to rating advertising: the reference point belongs visibly alongside, not in a footnote.

Enforcement: who checks and what follows

The most common route is the competition law warning letter from competitors or associations - with a cease-and-desist claim, a contractual penalty undertaking and cost reimbursement. The administrative fine under Section 19 UWG is the exception: it can only be imposed within a coordinated enforcement action under Article 21 of Regulation (EU) 2017/2394 (Gesetze im Internet). The range then reaches up to fifty thousand euros, and for larger turnovers up to 4 percent of annual turnover is provided for (Gesetze im Internet). For a mid-sized shop the warning letter is the real risk, not the authority - much as with the withdrawal button, which is likewise enforced through warning letters rather than inspections.

How far responsibility reaches was marked out by the Federal Court of Justice in its judgment of 20 February 2020 (case I ZR 193/18): the seller of a product offered on a large online marketplace is in principle not liable under competition law for customer reviews of that product (Bundesgerichtshof). One decisive point was that customer review systems on online marketplaces are socially desirable and enjoy constitutional protection (Bundesgerichtshof). The judgment predates the reform and concerns third-party content on a third-party platform. For your own shop, where you make the reviews accessible yourself, it offers no relief.

To gauge the density of scrutiny: the participating consumer protection authorities concluded that at least 55 percent of the screened websites potentially breach the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, with doubts remaining about a further 18 percent (European Commission 2022). A screening of this kind does not replace a court finding. It does show what authorities look at: the question of whether and how authenticity is secured - and whether the answer sits where it will be read.

Why the effort pays beyond the obligation

For many purchase decisions reviews are the central source of information. For more than every second online shopper in Germany, customer reviews were the most important source of information before buying - 55 percent according to a representative survey of 1,103 internet users conducted in 2020 (Bitkom 2020). Among 16 to 29 year olds, two thirds (66 percent) read online reviews, among 30 to 49 year olds 60 percent and among 50 to 64 year olds 51 percent (Bitkom 2020). A signal with that much influence on the decision tolerates no ambiguity about where it came from.

Describing openly how reviews reach the shop gives that source of information a frame. That is the real gain: the notice under Section 5b (3) UWG doubles as a trust building block, because it answers a question customers ask anyway. The editorial side of reviews - collecting them, replying, handling criticism - is covered in our article on product review management in the online shop; this piece deals with the legal frame around it.

Checklist for your own shop

The checklist fits the same cycle as other recurring shop obligations: a robust age verification for relevant assortments and accessible documents for invoices and datasheets. What these topics share is that they rarely sit in a single place; they are scattered across templates, feeds and output channels. Going through them together once a year finds the gaps before an opposing lawyer does.

If the implementation is put out to tender, the review display including its notice zone belongs in the requirements specification - otherwise it only surfaces at acceptance, when rebuilds are expensive. And anyone touching the review block anyway should add it to the automated interface tests: a notice that slips out of the visible area after a template update otherwise only comes to light when someone outside points it out.