Use case · E-commerce
Selling physical products in Europe. There's more to it than most teams expect.
GDPR gets all the attention. If you're shipping physical goods to European consumers, the regulatory surface is much wider, and most of it never makes it into the off-the-shelf platforms.
The regulation runs deeper than you'd think
Pricing transparency · up to 4% of turnover
The Omnibus Directive.
Any "discount" must be measured against your lowest price in the past 30 days. Inflating before a sale is illegal. Poland has already gone after Zalando and Temu. Your checkout has to track price history.
Packaging registration · up to €200k
LUCID, CITEO, and friends.
Ship to Germany and you must register with the LUCID packaging register before the first parcel. France has its own (CITEO). Miss it and marketplaces block your listings.
VAT across borders · 27 rates
One threshold, twenty-seven rates.
Cross €10,000 in cross-border sales and you charge the buyer's national rate, not yours. Your checkout needs to handle all 27 dynamically.
On top of that: Germany requires an Impressum on every page. France's Toubon Law requires a French-language interface. Each touches your software, not just your paperwork.
It's not only regulation
Geography · edge cases
Territories that aren't what they look like.
The Canary Islands ship like Spain but sit outside the EU VAT area, so your customer gets surprise import duties and your delivery promise breaks. French overseas territories run on different VAT and customs rules. The Åland Islands have their own status, separate from Finland.
Payments & UX · local defaults
Payment habits stop at the border.
Germans pay by invoice or SEPA, not card. The Netherlands runs on iDEAL — show a Dutch shopper a checkout without it and you lose the sale. Address formats, delivery expectations, and return rates all vary, and all of it lives in your product.
Sweepline maps the software layer for every market you want to sell into: what your checkout, data handling, and storefront need to support before you go live, not after the first complaint.