How many retailers actually publish their registration?
Every European country requires online sellers to publish their identity and company registration. Nobody measures whether they do. We read, one by one, the legal notices of more than 700 fashion, watch and eyewear retailers across five countries in August 2026. 562 could be published: the rest were excluded, and the reasons for those exclusions are themselves a finding. This is what that reading established.
What the survey measures
562
retailers whose registration was collected from a primary source
directory as of 2026-09-06, six countries, seven segments
68 %
publish the register details the law requires of them
210 of 311 German, Spanish and Italian retailers. Not computed for France and the United Kingdom, whose free public registers make the criterion incomparable
40 %
have a legal name unrelated to their trading name
225 of 562 retailers. A search by name therefore fails at that rate
1 in 18
French sites publishing another company's registration number
5 of 89 French sites read, August 2026 surveys. A field finding, not recomputed
The most demanding duty is the least observed
Article 2250 of the Italian civil code requires publication of the Partita IVA, the Registro Imprese number, the REA and the share capital. It is the most complete duty of the five countries studied. Across 61 Italian retailers surveyed in two separate campaigns, two publish their share capital. Germany, whose section 5 of the Telemedia Act requires fewer items, shows the best compliance observed. The explanation probably lies less in the text than in its enforcement: German law lets a competitor or an association serve a formal warning on the publisher directly, with no equally used equivalent elsewhere.
The commonest failure is not omission
One expects to find sites with no legal notice. What one mostly finds is sites publishing an incorrect one through carelessness. Five French sites of 89 display a third party's registration number: two advertising agencies, a consultancy, an IT provider, a trade body. In each case this is most likely the contractor that built the site, whose number stayed in the template. A reader checking that number would land on a real and unrelated company, which is more misleading than a gap.
The trading name will not find the company
Forty-one per cent of the French retailers surveyed have a legal name unrelated to their trading name. This is neither abnormal nor suspicious: one company may run several shops, or may have changed its trading name without changing structure. But it means verification by name fails in four cases out of ten, and may return an unrelated namesake. The survey found two companies sharing an identical name, one struck off and one active, running different businesses.
Personal data published instead of a company identifier
In Spain, forty retailers had to be excluded from this directory because they publish the tax identifier of a natural person, usually the trader themselves. That is personal data, which a third party cannot republish. Nineteen do so under the label CIF, which denotes a company identifier; two also claim entry in the commercial register; one presents itself with a company suffix in its name; and one displays a valid company identifier side by side with its director's personal one. None of these is detectable by reading the label: only a format check catches them. This is not fraud but a sole trader conflating their own identity with their business's, and it still deprives buyers of any way to check who they are buying from.
What these figures do not say
A site with an incomplete legal notice is not a fraudulent site. It is a site failing an information duty, which is common among small businesses with no legal department. None of the figures published here supports any conclusion of unlawful activity, and that is not what they measure. They measure how hard it is for a buyer to know who they are buying from, which is a real and separate problem.
How these figures were established
Every identifier was read directly in the primary source: the public register record where one is freely searchable, the retailer's own legal page elsewhere. No identifier was taken from a search engine result, and that was not a matter of principle: on a cross-checked sample, search snippets produced five wrong identifiers, including one where the company name, the address and the number were all incorrect. French identifiers were then re-checked against the public API, verifying company status, activity code and legal name.
Limits this survey accepts
- The sample is not random. Retailers were found by searching, which favours those visible online. The figures describe this sample, not the whole market.
- A legal page unreachable behind bot protection was counted as unverifiable, never as non-compliant. Such cases are numerous and appear in none of the published rates.
- The Spanish and Italian compliance rates rest on samples of a few dozen retailers. They indicate an order of magnitude, not precision to the percentage point.
- The survey dates from August 2026. A retailer may have corrected its legal notice since, and several probably have.
Reuse this data
The survey is published for free reuse, including commercially, provided Authentifia is credited and this page linked. The JSON file also carries the method and the limits, because a dataset is often republished detached from the page that explained it.
Checking a specific retailer
For each retailer surveyed, the directory publishes what could be verified and what could not, with the source and the date. Missing data is flagged as such, never filled in by inference.