EU Legal Guarantee Notice and GARAN Durability Label for WooCommerce

Description

From 27 September 2026 every trader selling goods to consumers in the European Union must show a harmonised notice about the legal guarantee of conformity before the customer buys. This is not optional and it is not limited to large shops. If you sell physical goods to EU consumers, it applies to you.

This plugin puts that notice on your WooCommerce product pages, in the official design, and adds the GARAN durability label on the products where a longer producer guarantee genuinely applies.

The rules come from Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1960, which carries out Directive (EU) 2024/825, the “Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition” directive. Article 3 of the regulation says plainly: “It shall apply from 27 September 2026.”

What you actually get

• The harmonised notice on the legal guarantee of conformity, reproduced from Annex I, in the official colours
• All 24 official EU languages, word for word as the European Commission publishes them, chosen automatically from the language of the page. WPML and Polylang are followed without any configuration
• The harmonised durability label, the one titled GARAN, reproduced from Annex II
• Both QR codes, pointing at the correct Your Europe pages, generated in advance and bundled in the plugin
• A choice of four places to show the notice on the product page, plus an editor block and a shortcode for anywhere else
• WooCommerce is optional. The obligation is on any trader selling goods to EU consumers, so the notice can go on a plain WordPress page with the block or the [sbgn_guarantee_notice] shortcode
• An option to repeat the notice on the cart page, and to include it in order confirmation emails
• Per product fields for the guarantee length in years, the brand or trademark, and the model identifier
• A countdown to the date, so you can see at a glance whether you are ready

There are two separate obligations, and they are not the same thing

Getting these confused is the easiest mistake to make, so this plugin keeps them firmly apart.

The notice is mandatory. It reminds the shopper that goods sold in the EU carry a legal guarantee of conformity of at least two years. Every trader selling goods must show it. There is no condition and no exemption for small shops. This plugin shows it automatically once activated.

The label is conditional, and the conditions are strict. The GARAN durability label may only be shown where the producer offers a commercial guarantee of durability that is longer than two years, free of charge, and covering the entire product. All three must be true at once.

Because of that, the label is switched off by default, and stays off until you turn it on for the shop and then again for each individual product. The plugin will not guess. It cannot know what guarantee a producer offers, and guessing would put a false claim about the goods on your shop.

If you tick the box but leave the guarantee length at 24 months or below, or leave the brand or model blank, the plugin quietly switches the label back off rather than displaying something incomplete. Exactly 24 months does not qualify: the commercial guarantee has to exceed the two year legal guarantee, so 24 is a fail, not a pass.

Why the text cannot be edited

There is no setting anywhere in this plugin that changes the wording of the notice, and there never will be.

Annex I, note 1 of the regulation states: “None of the elements of the harmonised notice can be edited.” The whole point of a harmonised notice is that it reads the same in every shop in the Union. A compliance plugin that offers you a “customise this text” box is a compliance plugin that stops being compliant the first time somebody uses it.

The same applies to most of the label. Annex II lists exactly three things you may change: the number of years, the brand or trademark, and the model identifier. Everything else, including the title, the tick, the calendar symbol, the QR code and the block of translations, is fixed. This plugin gives you fields for those three and nothing else.

Nothing leaves your server

No outbound request is made at any point, for any reason.

Both QR codes point at fixed European Commission pages, so they are generated in advance and shipped inside the plugin as small vector files rather than fetched or built at runtime. No third party learns that somebody looked at your product page. There is no account to create, no API key to enter, no external service, and no tracking.

The regulation specifies the font Inter. The plugin asks for Inter first, but deliberately does not pull it from a font CDN, because that would send your shopper’s IP address to somebody else’s server. If your theme already loads Inter you get it. Otherwise it falls back to the closest font on the visitor’s machine.

Built from the official text, not from a summary

Every string, colour and measurement in this plugin was taken from the regulation as published in the Official Journal, not from a blog post about it.

• Blue is Pantone Reflex Blue C, #003399
• Yellow is Pantone Yellow C, #FFED00
• The notice QR points at europa.eu/youreurope/guarantees
• The label QR points at the commercial guarantee of durability page named in Annex II, note 1

The annex artwork is an A4 print document. This plugin rebuilds it in HTML and CSS instead of dropping in a picture of it, for three reasons: an A4 image on a phone is an unreadable postage stamp, an image cannot be translated, and a screen reader cannot read one. The wording, the colours and the running order are preserved exactly.

The regulation itself supports this. Recital 15 describes the design as “language-neutral … which allows it to be easily used and reproduced by traders and producers across the Union”, and recital 14 requires colour when the contract is concluded through an online interface, which is what a WooCommerce shop is.

What this plugin does not do

It is worth being clear, because compliance tools are often sold on more than they deliver.

• It does not give legal advice, and it is not a substitute for it
• It does not check whether the guarantee you have entered is accurate. It cannot. It only prevents combinations that are obviously wrong
• It does not cover the rest of Directive (EU) 2024/825, such as the rules on vague environmental claims
• It does not show the notice on virtual or downloadable products, because the legal guarantee of conformity covers goods, and announcing a goods guarantee on a file download would be misleading
• It does not handle the printed, offline version of the notice, which has its own minimum sizes