For the categories concerned, every product sold in the European Union will have a digital passport: structured data on its materials and their origin, its performance, how to repair it and how to recycle it.
Your product page will have to give access to it before purchase. That means you will publish two descriptions of the same item, and the second will serve as a check on the first.
The benchmark
The passport is set out in the Ecodesign Regulation (EU) 2024/1781, which entered into force in July 2024. It won't apply to everything at once.
Each category waits for its own delegated act, which sets the required data and says whether the passport is kept per model, per batch or per item. The European Commission's 2025-2030 working plan puts apparel and tires first, with acts expected in 2027, then furniture in 2028 and mattresses in 2029.
In principle, the regulation allows at least eighteen months between the adoption of an act and its application, which pushes the apparel obligation to 2028 or 2029. Check the line for your category before you plan anything.
What changes on the product page
Article 32 of the regulation requires anyone selling at a distance to make the passport accessible before the order is placed, for example with a link or the product's unique identifier.
This is the consequence people see coming least. Today, no one checks the "Composition" accordion on your product page against another source. Tomorrow, a document built from your workshops' declarations will be one click away, and a skeptical customer, a consumer group or a shopping assistant will be able to compare the two.
If your product page promises more than the passport does, the gap will show on your own site.
The rule
Don't wait for the delegated act for your category. The passport itself, a QR code and a hosted page, can be ordered from a provider.
The data it contains sits in your supply chain, and no one can tell you how long your manufacturing partners will take to document it.
Some of it often exists already, but in the wrong place. In a recent audit of the Shopify store of a clothing brand the authors work with, they counted seven product page templates repeating the same blocks, with composition and care details typed by hand into accordions.
One typo had been copied identically into all seven. Each template had been created for a good reason, a launch or a new range, and they would probably have done the same.
They estimated about fifteen hours to move these texts into structured fields linked to the products, data entry included.
That is the project the passport will ask of you, and it pays off today, because each editorial fix only has to be made once.
The steps
- The inventory. For each product, note the information you have (materials, origin, care, repair) and where it lives: a workshop's file, the product page text, a team member's memory.
- The request to your workshops. Send them the list of fields and ask what they can document, and with what supporting evidence.
- The reference source. Store this data in structured fields, metafields and metaobjects on Shopify or a PIM, and never in the free text of the product page.
- The display. Connect the product page to these fields, so that composition, origin, care and repair come from the same source as the future passport.
- The review of your claims. Directive (EU) 2024/825 bans generic environmental claims, such as "eco-friendly," without recognized performance: remove from your product pages any you can't back up. Its rules were due to apply across the Union on September 27, 2026. France has not yet transposed it, but the Consumer Code already penalizes misleading practices on environmental impact, and the EU countries that have transposed it already apply it to your sales there.
The trap
Many teams file the topic under "later, for the legal team," yet the file you are building is useful right away: clean, structured attributes are also what Google Shopping and shopping assistants read, as we covered in our piece on the product page written for both humans and agents.
The line to pitch
Open the product pages of your ten best sellers and count the composition and origin details you could prove with a document received from a workshop. Copy the line below, then rewrite it with your own count for your leadership:
"Across our ten best sellers, we can prove X pieces of composition and origin information out of Y displayed. I propose moving them into structured fields this quarter: it's the foundation of the digital product passport, and it's what Google and shopping assistants already read."
This guide offers benchmarks and does not replace legal advice.
