If you were to study all the laws, you wouldn’t have time to break them.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When I look at some of the websites of other basket makers / wickerwork designers for the sake of interest, the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. And that’s regardless of whether it’s a self-created homepage, profiles in social media or on any sales platform.
Everyone should know that Germany and the EU are world champions when it comes to laws and regulations. For everything and everyone there is a paragraph somewhere that has to be taken into account and laws that hardly anyone knows exist.
Despite this, I keep noticing that basic information, details and obligations are either not provided at all or are inadequate. Whether this is due to ignorance or lack of knowledge is a moot point.
Yes, it is time-consuming and sometimes annoying to constantly keep up to date with all the (im)possible changes or innovations in the legal situation. And as a person and citizen, you can only shake your head at some of the things that are regulated by law. Nevertheless, there are still mandatory details and information that need to be published on the homepage, in social media and in shops. This also includes registrations with authorities and institutions.
And the list of these details is not exactly short
Regardless of how the website is designed (homepage, social media, shop), an imprint is always mandatory and the content is clearly regulated. This is always the case if the design indicates a commercial intention. And this applies all the more if goods or services are offered. The following mandatory information must be included
Name of the company
Name of the person or persons responsible
Full address (a PO box is not permitted)
Contact details (telephone and e-mail address if applicable)
VAT ID (if requested/required)
Furthermore, since 2016 (for online marketplaces), a reference and a link to the EU’s online dispute resolution platform must be provided. In addition, it must be stated whether or not you participate in the consumer arbitration procedure. This information does not necessarily have to be included in the legal notice, but it should still be easy to find.
The legal notice must be clearly visible and accessible from every page.
If you have not included an imprint, you are committing a competition offence and may be fined up to 50,000 euros and face the possibility of a chargeable warning.
Privacy policy
The most complicated and extensive part is probably the privacy policy. Everyone who stores data must have it and yet hardly anyone reads it. And here, too, it is mandatory for all types of websites, i.e. again for your own homepage, social media presence and shops. The reason for this is that so-called personal data is stored for all websites as soon as the website is visited: Server logs with IP address. Every email received with the sender’s email address that lands in your inbox and much, much more. And no topic is as fast-moving as the General Data Protection Regulation and the Federal Data Protection Act. Things are constantly changing here and the complexity is so high that errors can creep in very quickly. And a missing or incomplete privacy policy can ultimately be expensive.
So what should be included in the privacy policy? This can be completely different depending on the website. For your own website, it’s usually pretty clear. For social media such as Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and Tik Tok, the situation is quite different. And it also gets complicated with shops such as etsy, ebay, amazon, etc.
Personal data
Anyone who runs their own website knows or should know what personal data is collected.
IP address of the site visitor in the provider’s server logs
Address IP of visitor of site in or via a plugin, an app
via a contact form with user input such as email address, telephone number, address, etc.
via a note about the possibility of contacting us via telephone or email
Offering a newsletter
Shopping cart of a shop system
Address for shipping goods
The list can certainly be expanded as desired. As a rule, every person who operates a website and must have a more or less detailed data protection declaration is affected. Here too, as with the legal notice, it must be easy to recognize and accessible from every page.
What makes things even more difficult are third-party providers who happily collect data without asking. This is where consent and cookies come into play. Which service is used and may only be activated after consent by a site visitor? Everyone who uses the Internet knows this with the annoying cookie banners on every page they visit. Cookies may also contain personal data, such as the shopping cart on a shop page.
It’s all very complex and as a one-person or small business you can quickly find yourself overwhelmed when it comes to the GDPR.
You should exercise caution if you want to use the free text generators circulating on the Internet. There are few good things, but all the more bad ones. Such generators must always be kept up to date according to the latest specifications.
Consent and Cookies
Cookies and consent are another topic that must be mentioned in the data protection declaration. This is often overlooked or ignored by website operators. If you definitely do not set cookies and are sure about it, you can skip this section.
You can quickly put together your own homepage using the modular system promised in advertising. And yet you may fall into a trap if fonts are downloaded from Google without asking or your own videos are integrated from YouTube or Vimeo, for example. Personal data is usually immediately passed on to third parties without being asked and cookies are set without the site visitor’s prior consent.
It becomes problematic for most people as they determine for themselves whether their own homepage contains such pitfalls and sets third-party cookies without being asked or not. And if so, how can this be prevented without the consent of the site visitor. Here you first have to differentiate between technically necessary and non-necessary cookies. The data mentioned above are not technically necessary and always require consent before they can be stored on the visitor’s device.
Technically necessary cookies are, for example, session cookies, which are automatically deleted from the end device after you leave the page. But the selection of the cookie banner by the site visitor also falls under this category.
All other cookies are normally not technically necessary and require prior consent. And this is exactly where the banners always pop up when a page is visited. This annoys some people, including me, and it’s not uncommon for people to click on “Accept all” so that they don’t have to fight their way through long lists of all possible providers.
If you use a consent tool yourself, you should make sure that the different buttons are not designed in such a way that they influence a site visitor to click on certain buttons because they are more present and all other options are displayed in an inconspicuous and sometimes difficult to read manner.
Which consent tool is ultimately used depends on which software you use for your homepage. Usually it will be a CMS (Content Management System) such as WordPress, Joomla, Wix or similar.
Packaging law
For those who send their goods and products, the Packaging Act is just around the corner. And that comes with some obligations that are only vaguely explained here. Basically, all shipping packaging that is commercially marketed must be licensed!! Keyword Green Dot or Dual System. This applies to everything from envelopes to large cardboard boxes.
And if you think that packaging that has already been sent has already been licensed so I can continue to send it, you are wrong. It is not that easy.
So the first thing is to license packaging. The Internet is full of such providers. But that’s not enough. Since 2022, anyone who places packaging on the market commercially in Germany has been required to register with LUCID, the packaging register. Whether someone has registered is publicly available to anyone on LUCID. And of course, failure to register can result in a warning and a penalty.
Chamber of Crafts
All crafts are initially required to be registered with the relevant Chamber of Crafts. This also applies to the non-licensed trades, which include the wickerwork designer. So you become a forced member whether you want to or not. When you register your business, the responsible Chamber of Crafts is automatically notified.
However, under very specific conditions you can be exempted from mandatory membership in a chamber of crafts. This should always be clarified individually and depends, among other things, on the commercial income.
Business registration
In very few cases will you be able to avoid registering your business. Only those who earn a maximum of 410 euros per year do not need this. The following applies to everyone else: If you want to run a business, you also have to register it. This also applies to a side business.
The business registration must be done before, but at the latest, when the activity begins.
What many people are not aware of is the fact that when you become self-employed you no longer have to have health insurance, so you have to take out health insurance yourself. That can be a hefty sum per month. So clarify beforehand whether you can remain insured with your family.
The responsible tax office is informed when the business is registered. And the questionnaire will definitely come. Now probably only via ELSTER access. Anyone who is sure that they will not earn more than 22,000 euros per year can register as a small business owner according to Section 19 of the Sales Tax Act. If you expect to purchase from EU member states, things will be a little more complicated, but not impossible. Here you should contact your responsible clerk at the tax office.
Tax ID
As a small business owner, you don’t necessarily need a sales tax ID. However, if you operate online trading, this is mandatory and must be applied for.
The reason is that since July 2021, online marketplaces have been obliged to store the VAT ID in addition to other data.
Conclusion
There are certainly many other points in terms of rights and obligations that you have to take into account as soon as you have a website, a social media profile or an online marketplace on the Internet. And certainly the duties are significantly more than the rights.
I have only listed the points here that I have repeatedly noticed from others (sometimes negatively). It’s frightening with the naivety and ignorance that can be found on the Internet. And not just for basket makers and weave designers but also for many other self-employed people from other professions.
You can find a lot of information on all topics on the Internet using appropriate search terms. However, you should not rely on the fact that their content is actually up to date and, above all, correct and applicable to you in the way specified. A lot of sensitivity is required here and if in doubt you should seek professional help.
Which points I didn’t address
It is always possible to accommodate the required content on a homepage. Things get more complicated when it comes to social media profiles and online marketplaces. Especially if you don’t have a homepage to at least link to the texts on the website. Not all legally required fields will always be available to accommodate all information there. Everyone has to decide for themselves whether they want to take the risk of appearing on the Internet with insufficient mandatory information.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to me whether you stick to it or not. But perhaps I was able to sensitize one or two ignorant people to this challenging topic.
