A single walkthrough per task: what the rule requires, who it applies to, and the document you must end up with.
Read Your Compliance Calendar: The Deadlines That Matter, Australia's RCM Mark: Selling Down Under, and Brazil's INMETRO: Why Goods Sit at the Port.
Most cookie policies are wrong the day they're published, and the reason is mundane: the marketing team installed a new analytics script last month and nobody told whoever wrote the policy. The banner asks for consent; the policy lists trackers that no longer exist and omits three that do. Regulators notice exactly this mismatch, because it's the easiest finding to prove.
The European Accessibility Act has been in force since June 2025, and the first thing an enforcement body or a claimant's lawyer looks for is your accessibility statement — the page that documents how accessible your website, app or service actually is. Most businesses don't have one. Some have one from 2023 that no longer matches the site.
This is the deep-dive on the last of the five legal pages from the overview post.
The first time most small suppliers hear the term DPA, it's from a customer's procurement team explaining that the contract can't proceed without one. The Data Processing Agreement is the most commonly missing legal document in B2B, and it costs more stalled deals than any certificate you could name.
A terms page looks like boilerplate until the day you need it, and on that day its absence decides the outcome. A customer disputes a charge, a competitor copies your material, a client wants a refund a year later — with terms, you point at the clause. Without them, default law fills the gaps, and default law was not written with your business in mind.
This is the first of the deep-dives on the legal pages every business needs, following the overview post.
Scroll to the footer of any ten small-business websites and count the legal pages. You'll usually find a privacy policy. Sometimes terms. Rarely a cookie policy that matches the cookies actually loaded. Almost never a data processing agreement or an accessibility statement — the two pages that lose deals and invite complaints.
The footer is the least loved part of a website, and it's where liability quietly lives. This post covers the full set; the next four go deep on each page.
The glitter that made your lip scrub sparkle, the polymer beads in your face wash, the rubber crumb under the school football pitch — all of it is being phased out of the EU market under a single rule. If you make or sell cosmetics, detergents, fragrances or any consumer product with intentional synthetic microparticles, this one is already affecting you.
The restriction is Regulation (EU) 2023/2055, amending the REACH list of restrictions. Here's the practical version for a small brand.
If you sell clothing or shoes in France, you're already paying into a system that funds textile collection and recycling — and you may not even know it. France has run extended producer responsibility for textiles longer than anywhere else in the world. Now the EU is building a harmonised version for all 27 member states, and the habits you build in France today are the rehearsal for what's coming.
Everyone has seen the A-G sticker on a fridge. Almost nobody thinks about who had to register that fridge before it could be sold. If you import appliances, lighting or electronics into the EU — or stick your brand name on a factory's product — that someone is you.
The ecodesign and energy labelling rules are the oldest continuously enforced product regime in the EU, and they're changing around the edges as the ESPR replaces the old Ecodesign Directive. Here's what a small importer actually has to do.
Australia and New Zealand share a standards framework, a lot of product regulation, and one mark you'll meet in both: the RCM. If you sell electronics, electrical goods or anything with a radio Down Under, here's the system in plain terms — because the two countries share enough to be efficient and differ enough to trip you.
Your rain jacket, your non-stick pan, your cable insulation, your cosmetics: if it repels water, resists grease or survives heat, there's a decent chance a PFAS compound is doing the work. And there is a proposal on the table in Brussels to restrict them as a class — thousands of substances in one regulatory stroke.
This isn't one of those "maybe someday" initiatives. Five countries submitted a formal restriction proposal to ECHA in early 2023, the scientific committees have delivered their opinions, and the Commission decision is the next step. The backdrop is already public: 3M's $10 billion settlement with US water suppliers over PFAS in drinking water showed what this chemistry costs when regulators move. Small brands that wait for the final text before looking at their supply chains will be redesigning in a hurry.