Before you promote
Promotion feels like the zero-risk first step. Legally it is the moment everything else becomes due - here is what has to be true before the first post, ad or discount code.
Checked against the sources on 2026-08-30
Promotion is the starting gun, not the warm-up
The obligations in the country guides key off the start of commercial activity, and courts read advertising as exactly that. A landing page with a price on it makes the site commercial: imprint due, privacy notice due, registration clock running. Doing the paperwork the week after the launch thread is doing it late.
The practical order is short: register, put the legal shell up, then promote. The first two are an afternoon each; skipping them saves two afternoons and creates a surface a competitor can bill you for.
The checks, in order
The name survives being searched
Before the name is in a single post: trade mark registers (DPMA for Germany, EUIPO for the EU), the app stores if you will ever be in them, and a plain web search. Promotion is what makes a name collision visible to the other side - their lawyer finds you through your own launch thread.
The handle set matters as much as the domain: the name you promote should be the name people can find on every channel you will actually use.
The page you point at is dressed
Whatever the ad or post links to needs the full legal shell from the previous chapter - imprint, privacy notice, and if anything can be bought or reserved, terms and the withdrawal notice. This is the page a competitor screenshots.
If the page collects so much as an email address for a waiting list, the privacy notice must cover it and the double-opt-in confirmation must be wired, because that list is the first thing you will ever email.
Advertising rules for what you are actually saying
Prices shown to consumers must be final prices including VAT - "€5" that becomes €5.95 at checkout is a Preisangabenverordnung violation. If you are a Kleinunternehmer showing net prices "plus VAT", that is wrong the other way: your prices carry no VAT and should say so nowhere.
Discounts and launch offers are regulated claims: a struck-through "was" price must have really been charged before, and a countdown that resets is deception. Superlatives ("the best", "Germany’s first") need to be true or clearly puffery.
If other people promote for you - influencers, affiliate links, your own posts on personal accounts - paid or benefited promotion must be labelled as advertising. The label duty is the promoter’s, but the campaigns that get named in the ruling are the brand’s.
Email and messaging are consent-first
In Germany, promotional email without prior express consent is a UWG violation per recipient - there is no cold-outreach carve-out for B2C, and the B2B one is far narrower than the newsletters in your inbox suggest. Double opt-in is the evidentiary standard: you will one day need to prove the consent, and the confirmation click is the proof.
The same applies to messengers and push. A contact form submission is not newsletter consent; a checkout is not either, except for the narrow existing-customer exception with its own opt-out footnote.
Prize draws and referral codes have their own rules
A giveaway needs published conditions: who may enter, when it ends, how the winner is picked and told. Tying entry to a follow or a share is common and mostly tolerated; tying it to a purchase changes its legal nature.
Referral and discount codes are contract terms - decide before launch whether they stack, when they expire and what happens on refund, because the first support email will ask.
The traps
- Promoting before registering, on the theory that no revenue means no business. Advertising is the activity.
- A launch page with a price and no imprint - the single most screenshot-able violation there is.
- Net prices shown to consumers, or VAT lines shown by a Kleinunternehmer who charges none.
- A "was €X" price that never was, or a countdown that comes back.
- Emailing a waiting list that never confirmed via double opt-in.
- Unlabelled paid promotion by whoever is posting for you.
- A giveaway with no published conditions and no end date.
Where to check this yourself
- UWG - the unfair competition act§ 7 is unsolicited advertising; the annex is the blacklist of practices.
- PreisangabenverordnungFinal prices, and § 11 on strike-through reference prices.
- DPMA / EUIPO registersThe name check, before the first post.
This is a map, not legal or tax advice - and an honest one about how it was drawn: the Germany guide was written by a person who walked the route; most other countries were drafted with AI against the official sources and have not yet been walked by someone who did it. Laws change. Every guide carries the date it was last checked and the sources to check it yourself - and if you have been through one of these routes, your corrections are exactly what this handbook wants.